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PRESENTED  TO 


Libffo)  tie  Urkfsit|  of  California,  I 


.... 


SPEECHES, 


ADDRESSES  AND  LETTERS 


ON 


TO    WHICH    IS    ADDED 


AN  INTRODUCTION,  TOGETHER  WITH  COPIOUS  NOTES  AND  AN  INDEX. 


BY 


WILLIAM  D.  KELLEY,  M.  C. 


PHILADELPHIA: 

HENRY    CAREY    BAIRD, 

INDUSTRIAL    PUBLISHER, 
406      WALNUT       STREET. 

1872. 


Entered  according  to  Act  of  Congress,  in  the  year  1871,  by 

WM.    D.    KELLEY, 
In  the  Office  of   the  Librarian  of  Congress  at  Washington,  D.  C. 


S.  A.  GEORGE  &  Co.,  STEREOTYPERS. 
COLLINS,  PRINTER. 


TO 

THE  GREAT    MASTER    OF    ECONOMIC    SCIENCE, 
THE  PROFOUND  THINKER, 

AND    THE 

CAREFUL  OBSERVER  OF  SOCIAL  PHENOMENA, 

MY 
VENERABLE  FRIEND  AND  TEACHER, 

HENRY    C.    CAREY, 

THIS  VOLUME  IS  WITH  GRATEFUL   AFFECTION 
INSCRIBED    BY   THE 

AUTHOR. 

PHILAPA.,  Nov.  1,  1871. 


INTRODUCTION. 


IN  ottering  this  volume  to  the  public  it  is  proper  to  state 
that  I  make  no  pretension  to  a  critical  knowledge  of  litera 
ture  or  rhetoric,  and  that,  when  preparing  the  papers  it  con 
tains,  I  did  not  suppose  they  would  ever  be  collected  for 
republication.  They  are  expressions  of  opinion  called  forth 
by  Occasions ;  and,  as  the  reader  will  observe,  not  unfre- 
quently  in  the  excitement  of  current  debate  in  the  National 
House  of  Representatives,  or  in  response  to  invitations  to 
address  popular  assemblies  under  circumstances  that  pre 
cluded  the  possibility  of  reducing  them  to  writing  in  advance 
of  their  delivery.  It  is  proper  also  to  say  that  I  am  not 
wholly  responsible  for  their  publication  in  book  form,  inas 
much  as  they  have  been  collected  and  annotated  in  deference 
to  the  judgment  and  wishes  of  citizens  of  different  sections 
of  the  country,  who,  though  strangers  to  each  other  and  en 
gaged  in  pursuits  involving  apparently  conflicting  interests, 
agreed  in  persuading  me  that  by  this  labor  I  might  render  a 
service  to  those  of  my  countrymen  who  are  engaged  in  farm 
ing  or  who  depend  on  their  labor  for  the  means  of  support 
ing  their  children  while  giving  them  that  measure  of  educa 
tion  without  which  no  American  citizen  should  be  permitted 
to  attain  maturity. 

While  I  regret  some  expressions  in  the  colloquial  portions 
of  the  Congressional  speeches,  and  would  have  omitted  them 
could  it  have  been  done  without  impairing  the  argument,  I 
find  no  reason  to  question  the  soundness  of  my  positions. 
The  theory  that  labor — the  productive  exercise  of  the  skill 
and  muscular  power  of  men  who  are  responsible  for  the  faith 
ful  and  intelligent  performance  of  civic  and  other  duties — is 
merely  a  raw  material,  and  that  that  nation  which  pays  least 
for  it  is  wisest  and  best  governed,  is  inadmissible  in  a  de 
mocracy  ;  and  when  we  shall  determine  to  starve  the  bodies 
and  minds  of  our  operatives  in  order  that  we  may  successfully 
compete  in  common  markets  with  the  productions  of  the 
under-paid  and  poorty-fed  peasants  of  Europe  and  the  pau 
pers  of  England,  we  shall  assail  the  foundations  of  a  govern- 


y  INTRODUCTION. 

ment  which  rests  upon  the  intelligence  and  integrity  of  its  peo 
ple.     To  defend  our  country  against  this  result,  is  the  office 
of  a  protective  tariff,  and  for  this  duty  it  alone  is  sufficient. 
This  was  not  always  my  belief.     My  youthful  judgment 
was  captivated  by  the  plausible  but  sophistical  generalities 
by  which  cosmopolitanism  or  free  trade  is  advocated,  and 
my  faith  in  them  remained  unshaken  till  events  involving 
the  prostration  of  our  domestic  industry,  and  the  credit  not 
only  of  cities  and   States,  but  of  the  nation,  demonstrated 
the  insufficiency  or  falsity  of  my  long  and  dearly  cherished 
theories.     In  1847,  I  had  seen  with  gratification  the  protec 
tive  tariff  of  1842  succeeded  by  the  revenue  or  free  trade  tariff 
of  1846.    To  promote  this  change,  I  had  labored  not  only  with 
zeal  and  industry,  but  with  undoubting  faith  that  experience 
would  prove  its  beneficence.    A  number  of  remarkable  circum 
stances  conspired  to  promote  the  success  of  the  experiment. 
The   potato  rot  was  creating  an  unprecedented   foreign  de 
mand  for  our  breadstuffs.     It  was  then  ravaging  the  fields 
of  England  and  the  continent,  having  already  devastated  the 
fields,  and  more  than  decimated  the  people  of  Ireland,  who. 
to  escape  starvation,  were  fleeing  en  masse  to  this  country. 
The  gold  fields  of  Australia  and  California  nati  just  been  dis 
covered,  and  promised,  by  increasing  the  circulating  medium 
of  the  world,  and  concentrating  many  thousands  of  emigrants, 
who  would  engage  in  mining,  in  countries  without  agricul 
ture  or  manufactures,  to  create  great  markets  for  our  produc 
tions  of  every  kind,  thus  increasing  our  trade  and  quickening 
every  department  of  industry.     Beyond  all  this,  however, 
and,  as  I  afterwards  came  to  understand,  as  a  result  of  the 
condemned  protective  tariff,  in  conjunction  with  recent  im 
provements  in  our  naval  architecture,  our  commercial  marine 
was  growing  rapidly,  our  ship  builders  were  prosperous,  and 
our  ship  owners  were  receiving  as  compensation  for  extra 
speed  a  shilling  a  chest  in  advance  of  English  freights  for 
carrying  tea  from  Hong  Kong  or  Canton  to  London.     Each 
of  these  circumstances  was  a  good  augury  for  the  success  of 
a  tariff  for  revenue  only.     Going  into  effect  under  such  favor 
able  conditions,  it  must,  I  believed,  procure  for  our  farmers 
cheap  foreign  fabrics  and  wares,  and  secure  a  constantly  in 
creasing  market  for  the  productions  of  their  farms ;  and  by 
enlarging  our  share  in  the  carrying  trade  of  the  world  compel 
the  rapid  construction  of  ships  and  steamers,  whose  employ 
ment  would  increase  our  receipts  of  coin  and  immigrants. 
Trade  being  so  nearly  free,  we  must  in  a  few  years  see  the 
ships  of  all  nations  coming  to  New  York  for  assorted  cargoes, 
and  our  commercial  metropolis  would  then  become  the  finan 
cial  centre  of  the  world,  in  which  international  balances  would 


INTRODUCTION.  .  vii 

be  settled.  That  these  were  but  a  small  part  of  the  great 
results  my  theories  promised  will  appear  to  any  one  who 
will  refer  to  the  annual  reports  of  the  then  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury,  Robert  J.  Walker,  who  was  not  more  sanguine 
than  I,  and  whose  statements  of  the  general  prosperity  that 
would  flow  from  a  revenue  tariff  were  as  positive  and  rose- 
tinted  as  those  with  which  Messrs.  Atkinson  and  Wells  now 
beguile  their  followers. 

Were  we  early   revenue  reformers   worshippers  at   false 
shrines,   or   did  the    sequel    approve  our   faith  ?      History 
answers  these  questions  with  emphasis.     It  needed  but  a  de 
cade  to  demonstrate  the  folly  of  attempting  to  create  a  mar 
ket   for   our    increasing    agricultural    productions,    and   to 
develop  our  mining   and    manufacturing   resources  by  the 
application  of   the  beautiful  abstractions   disseminated  by 
Free    Trade    Leagues.      It   was  just   ten   years   after  the 
substitution  of  the  revenue  tariff  of  1846  for  the  protective 
tariff  of  1842,  that  the  general  bankruptcy  of  the  American 
people  was  announced  by  the  almost  simultaneous  failure  of 
the  Ohio  Life  and  Trust  Company,  and  the  Bank  of  Pennsyl 
vania,  and  the  suspension  of  specie  payments  by  almost 
every   bank    in   the   country.      In   that   brief    period,   our 
steamers  had  been  supplanted  by  foreign  lines,  and    our 
clipper  ships  driven  from  the  sea,  or  restricted  to  carrying 
between  our  Atlantic  and  Pacific  ports.     At  the  close  of 
that  brief  term,  the  ship-yards  of  Maine  were  almost  as  idle 
as  they  are  now  when  railroads  traverse  the  country  in 
all  directions  and  compete  with  ships  in  carrying  even  such 
bulky  commodities  as  sugar,  cotton,  and  leaf  tobacco  ;*  and 
while  the  families  of  thousands  of  unemployed  workmen  in 
our  great  cities  were  in  want  of  food,  Illinois  farmers  found 
in  corn,  for  which  there  was  no  market,  the  cheapest  fuel 
they  could  obtain,  though  their  fields  were  underlaid  by  an 
inexhaustible   deposit  of  coal  that   is  almost  co-extensive 
with   the   State.      Capital   invested   in   factories,  furnaces, 
forges,  rolling  mills  and  machinery  was  idle  and  unproduc 
tive,  and  there  was  but  a  limited  home  market  for  cotton  or 
wool.     Taking  advantage  of  this  condition  of  affairs,  foreign 
dealers  put  their  prices  down  sufficiently  to  bankrupt  the 
cotton  States,  to  induce  many  of  our  farmers  to  give  up 
sheep  raising,  and  to  constrain  many  thousand  immigrants 
who  could  not  find  employment  to  return  to  their  native 
countries.    1847  had  been  a  good  year  for  farmers,  mechanics, 
miners  and  merchants  ;  but  1857  was  a  good  year  for  sheriffs, 


*  See  figures  from  the  report  of  Mr.  Nimmo,  Chief  of  Tonnage  Division,  in 
note,  page  431. 


Viii  INTRODUCTION. 

constables  and  marshals,  though  few  were  purchasers  at  their 
sales  except  mortgagees,  judgment  creditors,  and  capitalists 
who  were  able  to  pay  cash  at  nominal  prices  for  unproductive 
establishments,  and  hold  them  till  happier  circumstances 
should  restore  their  value. 

Not  one  of  the  glowing  predictions  of  Political  Economy 
had  been  fulfilled,  and  the  surprise  with  which  I  contemplated 
the  contrast  presented  by  the  condition  of  the  country  with 
what  it  had  been  at  the  close  of  the  last  period  of  protection, 
amounted  to  amazement.  Nor  did  my  cherished  theories 
enable  me  to  ascertain  the  cause  of  the  sudden  and  general 
paralysis,  or  suggest  a  remedy  for  it.  Yet  I  could  not 
abandon  them,  for,  as  their  ablest  recent  American  champion, 
Mr.  Edward  Atkinson,  of  Boston,  in  his  article  in  the  Atlantic 
Monthly  for  October,  says  of  the  details  of  the  Revenue  Re 
form  budget,  they  were  "  simple,  sensible,  and  right."  Was 
not  each  one  a  truism  that  might  be  expressed  as  a  maxim — 
an  indisputable  proposition — the  mere  statement  of  which  es 
tablished  its  verity  ?  To  prove  that  they  were  not  responsible 
for  the  prostration  of  our  industries,  the  want  of  a  market 
for  our  breadstuffs,  and  the  widespread  bankruptcy  that  pre 
vailed,  required  the  enunciation  of  but  one  of  them  :  CUS 
TOMS  DUTIES  ARE  TAXES.*  No  one  can  dispute  this  proposi 
tion,  for  the  people  pay  them,  and  the  Government  collects 
them,  and  not  only  may  but  should  raise  its  entire  revenue 
through  them.  Surely  nobody  could  have  the  temerity  to 
assert  that  an  industrious  and  prosperous  people  could  be  re 
duced  to  idleness  and  bankruptcy  by  the  repeal  or  reduction 
of  taxes,  and  thus  charge  this  national  disaster  to  free  trade 
and  the  doctrinaires  who  had  kindly  taught  us  Political 
Economy,  and  induced  us  to  abandon  the  protective  s}^stem. 
The  case  was  clear.  Yet,  strange  to  say,  perfect  as  the  de 
monstration  seemed  to  be,  I  was  forced  by  the  condition  of 
the  country  to  doubt  and  ask  myself  whether,  in  some  occult 
way,  the  reduction  of  the  rate  of  duties  might  not  have  had 
something  to  do  with  producing  it.  The  results  promised 
b}'  the  teachers  of  my  cherished  science,  and  those  attained 
by  experiment,  were  irreconcilable,  and  I  was  constrained  to 
ask  myself  whether  it  might  not  be  possible  tha,t  Political 
Economy  was  not  an  exact — .an  absolute — science,  the  laws 
of  which  were  equally  applicable  to  all  nations,  without  re 
gard  to  the  conditions  and  requirements  of  the  people,  or 
the  extent,  variety  or  degree  of  the  development  of  their  re 
sources  ?  It  was  easier  to  harbor  this  doubt  than  to  believe 
the  alternative,  which  was,  that  the  Almighty  had  not  put 

*  See  Dr,  Bushnell,  in  note,  pages  317,  318. 


INTRODUCTION".  ix 

production,  commerce  and  trade  in  the  United  States  under 
the  government  of  universal  and  immutable  laws,  but  had 
left  them  to  the  control  of  chance.  This  conclusion  being 
inadmissible,  there  was  nothing  left  but  to  waive  the  further 
consideration  of  the  subject,  or  to  withdraw  my  theories  from 
the  dazzling  light  of  abstract  reason,  and  examine  them 
under  the  shade  of  present  experience. 

It  is  a  cardinal  maxim  among  the  adherents  of  free  trade 

that    TWO    MARKETS    IN  WHICH    TO   BUY  AND    SELL  ARE  BETTER 

THAN  ONE,  and  I  could  not  dispute  it;  but  when  in  the  pro 
gress  of  my  re-examination,  I  announced  it  to  an  intelligent 
protectionist  as  indisputable,  he  admitted  that  it  was  so. 
"But,"  said  he,  "where  is  the  evidence  that  free  trade  is 
the  road  to  two  markets  for  the  United  States  ? "  In 
endeavoring  to  answer  this  question  satisfactorily  to  myself 
it  became  apparent  that  I  had  evaded  the  real  point  at 
issue.  Both  parties  to  the  controversy  agree  that  two  mar 
kets  are  better  than  one.  But  the  protectionists  say,  "  Do 
not  risk  the  loss  or  diminution  of  the  home  market  afforded 
b}r  our  people  when  fully  employed  and  well  paid,  by  at 
tempting  to  secure  another,  in  a  direction  where  success  will 
be,  to  say  the  least,  exceedingly  doubtful ; "  the  free  traders 
saying,  "  Court  foreign  trade  by  all  means,  and  as  you 
are  sure  of  the  home  market,  you  will  thus  secure  two." 
Which  are  right  ?  To  determine  this,  we  must  ascertain 
whether  trade  between  nations  is  reciprocal  or  nearty  so.* 
To  settle  this  question,  I  made  a  thorough  and  searching 
appeal  to  the  trade  statistics  of  our  own  and  other  countries, 
and  ascertained  that  the  amount  of  our  productions  con 
sumed  by  the  manufacturing  nations  of  Europe  has  in  no 
degree,  in  any  year,  depended  upon  the  amount  of  their  pro 
ductions  consumed  by  us ;  but  on  the  contrary,  that  they 
never  took  an  equal  amount,  and  frequently,  when  we  were 
taking  most  from  them,  took  least  of  everything  but  cotton, 
which  they  could  not  obtain  elsewhere,  from  us.  Thus  it 
had  often  occurred  that  when  our  store-houses  were  being 
gorged  with  productions  of  the  underpaid  workmen  of  Eng 
land,  she,  taking  gold  and  silver  from  us,  had  gone  to 
Prussia,  German}^,  Austria,  Turkey,  and  France,  who  bough 
but  little  from  her,  and  the  chief  diet  of  whose  laboring 
people  consisted  of  rye  bread,  potatoes  and  garlic,  for  her 
breadstuffs.  This  examination  further  showed  that  the 
amount  of  breadstuffs  England  will  ever  take  from  us  is 
measured  b}r  the  slight  deficiency  she  may  expect  to  experi 
ence  after  having  exhausted  the  markets  of  those  lower  priced 

*  See  extract  from  Kirk's  Social  Politics,  in  note,  page  186. 


X  INTRODUCTION. 

countries,  whose  people  are  subjects,  and  whose  wages  mark 
the  minimum  on  which  families  may  subsist.  When  ^Esop's 
stupid  dog  snapped  at  the  shadow  in  the  water  he  lost  his 
bone  ;  and  the  investigation  convinced  me  that  the  attempt 
to  secure  a  second  market  by  reducing  our  customs  duties 
had  destroyed  our  home  market,  but  opened  no  other  for 
any  of  our  productions  except  gold  and  silver,  and  State  and 
corporate  bonds.  It  had  given  England,  with  her  low  rates 
of  wages  and  interest,  two  markets  in  which  to  sell,  and  by 
destroying  our  home  market  for  grain,  an  additional  one  in 
which  to  buy;  but  had  deprived  us  of  the  one 'on  which, 
under  an  adequate  S3^stem  of  protection,  we  could  always 
depend,  as  has  been  shown  by  the  uniform  general  prosperity 
that  has  prevailed  since  the  Morrill  tariff  of  1861  went  into 
effect.  Thus  it  appeared  that  the  fallacy  was  not  in  the  ab 
stract  proposition  which  neither  party  disputed,  but  in  the 
assumption  that  free  trade  would  insure  us  two  markets. 

Kindred  to  the  foregoing  proposition,  and  equally  unde 
niable  as  an  abstract  truth,  seemed  this  other :  You  SHOULD 
BUY  WHERE  YOU  CAN  BUY  CHEAPEST.*  Yet  we  had  been  doing 
this  for  ten  years,  and  were  bankrupt.  This  condition  of  affairs 
could  not,  it  seemed  to  me,  be  the  result  of  reduced  rates  of 
duties,  and  the  payment  of  reduced  prices  for  what  we  had 
consumed.  What  process  of  reasoning  could  show  these 
facts  to  be  related  as  cause  and  effect  ?  England  could  sell 
us  railroad  bars  to  lay  over  our  wide  stretches  of  limestone 
country,  and  our  immense  fields  of  coal  and  iron,  at  lower 
prices  than,  in  the  undeveloped  condition  of  our  resources, 
and  with  our  higher  priced  labor  and  money,  we  could  pro 
duce  them  ;  and  we  had  bought  our  supply  from  her.  With 
her  accumulated  capital,  machinery,  skilled  labor,  and  her 
lower  wages,  she  could  also  spin  and  weave  cotton  and  wool, 
and  make  the  cloth  into  garments  cheaper  than  our  country 
men  could,  and  we  had  bought  from  her  our  clothes,  or  the 
cloth  from  which  to  cut  them.  So,  too,  she  could  sell  us 
chemicals,  prepared  drugs,  pig-iron,  raw  steel,  and  an  im 
mense  number  of  other  commodities  for  less  money  than  we 
could  produce  them ;  and  we  had  gone  to  her  markets  and 
bought  them  where  we  could  buy  them  cheapest.  Mean 
while,  we  had  mined  hundreds  of  millions  of  dollars  worth  of 
gold  and  silver ;  had  raised  unprecedented  crops  of  cotton, 
tobacco,  and  breadstuffs  ;  had  produced  immense  supplies  of 
naval  stores  and  other  exportable  commodities ;  and  had, 
withal,  issued  hundreds  of  millions  of  interest-bearing  bonds, 
by  which  our  future  productions  and  those  of  our  posterity 

*  See  Dr.  Bushnell,  in  notes,  pages  285  and  35 1. 


INTRODUCTION.  XI 

were  mortgaged.  Yet,  strange  to  tell,  in  spite  of  the  lower 
duties  paid  on  our  imports,  and  the  lower  than  American 
prices  at  which  we  had  procured  our  supplies,  we  had  not 
gold  and  silver  enough  to  serve  as  a  basis  for  a  redeemable 
currency,  and  being,  in  many  instances,  unable  to  pay  the 
interest  on  our  bonds  were  sued  and  sold  out  by  our  English 
friends,  to  whom  our  gold,  silver,  and  bonds  had  gone.  We 
were,  however,  rich  in  one  class  of  commodities — the  produc 
tions  of  the  farm.  Of  these  the  people  of  the  Western  States 
had  a  superabundance.  It  was,  however,  unfortunately,  not 
possible  to  make  them  available,  as  our  English  creditors 
would  not  take  them  even  in  payment  of  debts  unless  we 
would,  after  paying  for  their  transportation  to  the  sea-board, 
let  them  have  them  at  the  low  prices  at  which  they  could 
obtain  like  articles  which  had  been  produced  by  the  ill-fed 
peasants  of  Russia,  Prussia,  Austria,  Hungary,  and  Turkey. 
Than  to  do  this  it  was  better  for  fanners  in  the  extreme 
West  to  let  their  crops  perish  on  the  field. 

Our  condition  was  anomalous.  There  was  no  element  of 
wealth,  or  of  the  conveniences  of  life  that  could  be  produced 
by  a  reasonable  amount  of  labor  outside  of  the  tropics  of 
which  we  did  not  possess  greater  stores  in  the  form  of  raw 
materials  than  any  other  nation ;  and  of  the  productions  of 
the  farm  our  supply  was  so  superabundant  that  some  of  us 
were,  as  I  have  said,  using  corn  for  fuel ;  yet,  our  manu 
facturing  operatives  were  poor  and  unemployed,  our  farmers 
were  unable  to  pay  for  past  purchases  or  fresh  supplies,  and 
our  merchants  and  banks,  involved  in  the  common  fate,  were 
unable  to  meet  their  obligations.  Did  this  strange  ex 
perience  prove  that  it  is  not  best  to  buy  where  you  can  buy 
cheapest?  No.  But  it  did  prove  that  money-price  is  not 
the  test  of  cheapness;  and  that  we  buy  more  cheaply,  though 
the  nominal  price  of  each  commodity  be  higher  when  we  buy 
what  we  consume  of  those  who  will  buy  what  we  produce  at 
fair  prices,  than  we  do  when  we  buy  at  lower  prices  for  cash, 
or  on  credit,  and  permit  our  productions  to  perish  for  the 
want  of  a  market.  Thus  did  deductions  from  unquestion 
able  and  present  experience  demonstrate  the  fallacy  of  the 
system  of  "  established  principles,"  which  I  had  cherished 
as  a  sufficient  economic  creed. 

The  terrible  ordeal  through  which  the  working  classes  of 
England  are  now  passing,  is  constraining  her  statesmen  and 
scholars  to  bring  the  prevailing  system  of  Political  Economy 
to  the  test  of  experience,  and  one  of  these  scholars  has  been 
bold  enough  to  deny  not  only  the  policy,  but  the  morality  of 
the  proposition  I  have  just  considered.  Mr.  David  Syme,  in 
a  well-considered  and  powerful  article  on  the  "  Method  of  Po 
B 


Xii  INTRODUCTION. 

litical  Economy,"  in  the  Westminster  Review  for  July,  1871, 
which  has  come  under  my  notice  since  the  foregoing  was 
written,  says  : 

"A  close  investigation  will,  indeed,  lead  to  the  conclusion 
that  the  spirit  of  "the  moral  law  is  incompatible  with  the 
modern  economic  doctrine  of  buying  in  the  cheapest,  and 
selling  in  the  dearest  market.  For  a  scrupulous  sense  of 
dut3r  will  often  compel  a  man  to  act  contrary  to  his  own 
personal  interests.  Such  a  man  will  conduct  himself  in  his 
business  relations  on  the  strictest  principles  of  honor  and 
fair  dealing.  He  will  refuse  to  take  an  advantage  when  the 
law  may  permit  it,  when,  by  so  doing,  he  might  prejudice 
the  interests  of  others.  He  will  not  take  all  he  can  get,  and 
give  as  little  as  he  can  ;  but  he  will  give  as  much  as  he  can 
afford,  and  take  only  what  is  fair  and  equitable.  This  is  not 
Utopianism,  but  the  true  spirit  of  the  moral  law. 

"  If,  moreover,  we  consider  man  in  the  social  state,  we  shall 
find  that  the  individual  is  bound  to  recognize  the  interests 
of  others  as  well  as  his  own.  He  cannot,  even  if  he  would, 
be  guided  in  his  social  relations  by  an  exclusive  regard  for 
his  own  interests.  In  seeking  his  own  advantage  he  must 
be  careful  to  do  nothing  that  might  in  any  way  be  injurious 
to  his  neighbor.  He  must  not  sell  a  spurious  article  for  a 
genuine  one,  nor  a  deleterious  compound  for  a  wholesome 

one.     He  must  not  use  false  labels  or  unjust  weights 

Economic  science  recognizes  the  existence  of  the  social 
state,  and  the  social  state  presupposes  the  existence  of  the 
social  virtues — honor,  honesty,  and  a  regard  for  the  feelings 
and  rights  of  others." 

It  was  not  easy  to  abandon  opinions  I  had  cherished 
through  so  many  years,  and  in  which  my  faith  had  been  so 
implicit,  but  it  was  still  more  difficult  to  accept  the  oppo 
site  system,  that  of  protection,  which  I  had  so  often  de 
nounced  as  false,  selfish,  and  exclusive.  Nor  did  I  do  this 
hastily :  more  than  two  years  had  been  devoted  to  the 
writings  of  the  ablest  advocates  of  both  systems,  and  still  I 
halted  between  them.  Meanwhile,  it  became  apparent  to 
me,  not  only  that  Political  Economy  was  not  a  science,  but 
that  it  was  impossible  to  frame  a  system  of  abstract  economic 
propositions  which  would  be  universally  applicable  and  bene 
ficent  ;  and,  further,  that  the  same  principles  could  not  be 
applied  beneficially  to  England  and  the  United  States.  The 
conditions  of  the  two  nations  are  not  the  same,  but  are  in 
-striking  contrast.  England  is  a  small  island,  but  the  United 
States  embraces  almost  the  entire  available  territory  of  a 
continent.  The  former  is  burdened  by  an  excess  of  popula 
tion,  and  vexed  by  the  question  as  to  how  she  shall  dispose 


INTRODUCTION-.  Xlil 

of  the  excess  ;  but  our  great  need  is  industrious  people,  and 
with  us  the  question  is  how  can  we  increase  immigration.  She 
has  to  import  food  for  half  her  people,  and  her  foreign  trade 
is  to  her  what  seed-time  and  harvest  are  to  the  countries  from 
which  she  procures  the  breadstuffs  she  requires  but  cannot 
produce ;  but  were  they  on  our  soil,  -we  could  feed  ten  times 
the  number  of  her  whole  people  ;  and  even  while  I  write,  the 
merchants  of  Minnesota,  Iowa,  and  other  northwestern  States 
are  suffering  financial  embarrassment  because  the  farmers 
they  supply  cannot  find  a  market  for  their  crops.  She  is 
dependent  on  foreign  countries  for  most  of  the  raw  mate 
rials  she  consumes ;  but  we  have  within  our  limits  exhaust- 
less  stores  of  every  variety  not  dependent  upon  tropical  heat 
for  their  production.  Her  resources  are  ascertained  and 
developed ;  but  ours  await  development,  and  in  regions,  any 
one  of  which  is  larger  than  all  western  Europe,  including 
the  British  Islands,  await  definite  ascertainment.  Her  popu 
lation  is  compacted  within  narrow  limits,  and  her  railroads  are 
completed  and  paid  for;  but  our  people  are  settled  sparsely 
over  half  a  continent,  and  most  of  our  system  of  roads,  for 
which  the  capital  is  yet  to  be  produced,  is  to  be  constructed. 
The  charges  for  transportation  within  her  circumscribed  and 
populous  limits  are  very  light ;  but  over  our  extended  and 
thinly-settled  country  they  are  necessarily  heavy.  Her  facto 
ries  were  erected  and  supplied  with  machinery  while  she  main 
tained  the  most  rigid  system  of  protection  the  world  has 
ever  seen  ;  but  ours  are  to  be  built  as  experiments  in  the 
face  of  threatened  free  trade  which  would  involve  a  more 
unequal  competition  than  any  against  which  she  defended 
hers  by  protective  duties  and  absolute  prohibitions.  Her 
average  rate  of  interest  is  3  per  cent,  per  annum ;  but  ours 
is  never  less  than  6  per  cent,  per  annum,  and  in  large  sec 
tions  of  the  country  is  often  3  percent,  per  month.  The  great 
bod}7  of  her  laborers,  even  since  the  recent  extension  of  the 
suffrage,  are  subjects  without  civic  duties  ;  but  ours  are  citi 
zens,  and  liable  to  such  duties.  She  pays  the  daily  wages  of 
her  workmen  with  shillings ;  but  we  pay  ours  with  dollars 
worth  four  shillings  each,  and  give  many  classes  of  them 
more  dollars  than  she  does  shillings :  It  is,  therefore,  impos 
sible  that  the  same  economic  polity  can  be  applied  with  equal 
advantage  to  countries  whose. condition  presents  so  many 
and  such  important  contrasts. 

Ten  years  under  a  tariff  which  levied  the  lowest  rates  of 
duties  consistent  with  the  purpose  of  raising  by  imports  the 
amount  of  revenue  required  by  the  current  expenses  of  the 
government,  sufficed  to  destroy  the  industries  and  credit  of 
the  American  people.  The  immense  advantages  England 


xiv  INTRODUCTION 

possesses  in  manufactures  and  trade  have  enabled  her  to  with 
stand  the  untoward  influence  of  free  trade  for  a  longer  period 
than  we  were  able  to  ;  but  at  the  end  of  a  quarter  of  a  cen 
tury  it  has  become  apparent  that  even  the  mistress  of  the  seas 
and  the  work-shop  of  the  world  cannot,  at  less  cost  than  the 
loss  of  national  prestige  and  threatened  revolution,  throw 
her  ports  open  to  unrestricted  competition.  The  effect  on 
England  of  the  abandonment  of  the  protective  system  does 
not  exhibit  itself  in  wide-spread  bankruptcy  as  it  did  with 
us.  The  enormous  accumulations  of  capital  held  by  her 
privileged  classes  have  prevented  this.  It  is,  however,  ob 
servable  in  the  disappearance  of  the  small  farmer,  and  of  the 
small  work-shop  that  in  more  prosperous  times  would  have 
expanded  into  a  factory  ;  in  the  concentration  of  land  and 
machinery  in  the  hands  of  a  constantly  diminishing  number 
of  persons  ;  and  in  the  rapidly  increasing  destitution,  idle 
ness,  intemperance,  and  despair  of  her  laboring  classes.* 

In  the  course  of  his  admirable  sermon  before  the  Univer 
sity  of  Oxford,  December  20th,  1868,  Kev.  Brooke  Lambert 
said  :  "  The  severance  between  the  rich  and  the  poor  is  to  me 
an  even  sadder  thing  than  the  wretched  state  of  the  labor 
market.  I  can  fancy  a  remedy  possible  for  the  one,  I  can 
foresee  no  remedy  for  the  other.  The  gap  between  them 
seems  widening  every  day,  as  trade  and  land  fall  into  the 
hands  of  large  capitalists,  who  absorb  all  smaller  concerns, 
all  smaller  holdings."  And  Blackwood's  Magazine  for  April, 
1870,  in  an  article  entitled  "  The  State,  the  Poor,  and  the 
Country,"  says :  "  The  lamentable  depression  of  trade,  and 
consequent  want  of  employment  which  have  recently  prevailed, 
have  now  reached  a  most  serious  magnitude  in  many  of  the 
larger  towns,  and  most  of  all  in  London  and  its  far-spreading 
suburbs.  The  intensity  of  the  distress  in  the  metropolitan 
districts  has  not  been  equalled  in  recent  times.  And  the 
break-down  of  our  Poor-law  system,  despite  all  efforts  of 
voluntary  associations,  has  been  appalling  in  its  results. 
Not  a  week  passes  without  several  cases  of  '  deaths  from 
starvation,'  duly  attested  by  the  verdict  of  coroners'  in 
quests,  where  the  medical  and  other  evidence  reveals  an 
amount  of  unaided  wretchedness  and  starvation,  which  one 
would  suppose  impossible  in  a  civilized  country.  Men, 
women  and  children  dying  from  sheer  famine  in  the  heart 
of  the  wealthiest  city  in  the  world  !  " 

The  extracts  from  the  works  of  Sir  John  Byles,  Sir 
Edward  Sullivan,  Professor  Kirk,  Messrs.  Grant,  Patterson, 
Smith,  Hoyle,  and  other  recent  British  writers,  which  will 
be  found  in  notes  throughout  this  volume,  more  than  con- 

*  See  extracts  from  Grant's  Home  Politics,  in  note,  pages  31,  32 ;  and  Sir  Ed- 
ward  Sullivan's  Protection  to  Native  Industry,  pages  194,  195. 


INTRODUCTION.  XV 

firm  this  statement.  Sir  Edward  Sullivan  admonishes  the 
governing  classes  that  if  they  do  not  wish  to  reduce  England 
to  the  condition  of  a  manufacturing  country  without  work 
shops  or  skilled  workmen,  they  must  protect  native  industry 
sufficiently  to  restore  the  home  market  for  cotton  fabrics, 
which  has  fallen  off  35  per  cent.,  by  reason  of  the  fact  that  the 
enforced  idleness  of  masses  of  the  working  people  has  de 
prived  them  of  the  ability  to  consume  this  indispensable  ele 
ment  of  comfortable  attire ;  and  Mr.  Hoyle  produces  from 
official  statistics  the  figures  to  prove  the  startling  statement. 

Nor  can  the  British  Government  longer  close  its  eyes  to 
this  distress  and  continue  to  assert  that  THE  LAW  OF  SUPPLY 
AND  DEMAND  is  the  heaven-appointed  and  all-sufficient  regu 
lator  of  societaiy  movements.  It  is  even  now  feebly  attempt 
ing  to  regulate  both  supply  and  demand  by  its  own  action. 
To  this  end  Earl  Granville,  Foreign  Secretary,  as  early  as 
the  14th  of  April,  1870.  addressed  a  circular  dispatch  to  the 
Governors  of  British  Colonies,  from  which  I  take  the  follow 
ing  paragraph : 

"  The  distress  prevailing  among  the  laboring  classes  in 
many  parts  of  the  United  Kingdom  has  directed  public 
attention  to  the  question  of  Emigration  as  a  means  of  relief. 
It  has  been  urged  on  Her  Majesty's  Government  that  while 
there  are  in  this  country  large  numbers  of  well-conducted, 
industrious  laborers,  for  whom  no  emploj'ment  can  be  found, 
there  exists  in  most  of  the  colonies  a  more  extensive  demand 
for  labor  than  the  laboring  class  on  the  spot  can  supply. 
The  result  of  emigration  would,  therefore,  it  is  said,  be 
equally  advantageous  to  the  emigrant  and  the  colonies — to 
the  former,  by  placing  him  in  a  position  to  earn  an  indepen 
dence  ;  to  the  latter,  by  supplying  a  want  that  retards  their 
progress  and  prosperity.  Under  the  circumstances,  Her 
Majesty's  Government  is  anxious  to  be  furnished  with  your 
opinion  as  to  the  prospects  which  the  colony  under  your 
government  holds  out  to  emigrants,  both  of  the  agricultural 
and  the  artisan  class. 

"  The  points  on  which  we  should  be  specially  desirous  of 
eceiving  information  are :  the  classes  of  laborers  whose 
tabor  is  most  in  demand  in  the  colony  un^er  your  govern 
ment  ;  the  numbers  for  whom  employment  could  be  found; 
the  probable  wages  they  would  earn  ;  whether  married  men 
with  families  could  obtain  wages  to  enable  them  .o  support 
their  families,  and  house  accommodation  for  their  shelter ; 
what  assistance  or  facilities  would  be  provided  to  pa&s  the 
emigrants  to  the  districts  where  their  labor  is  in  demand  ; 
and  whether  any  pecuniary  assistance  would  be  granted 


XVI  INTRO  DUCTIOX. 

either  toward  their  passages,  or  toward  providing  depots 
and  subsistence  on  their  "first  arrival,  or  toward  sending 
them  up  to  the  country." 

That  England  will  soon  so  far  modify  her  revenue  system 
as  to  re-adopt  many  of  the  distinctive  features  of  the  Pro 
tective  System,  I  confidently  predict.  Not  that  I  credit  her 
privileged  classes  with  quick  or  enlarged  sympathy  with  the 
laboring  classes,  but  because  I  know  that  they  have  always 
had  sufficient  tact  to  avert  popular  outbreak  by  timely  con 
cession.  And  though  I  remember  how  the  people  of  Ireland 
and  Orissa  were  permitted  to  starve,  I  still  believe  that 
the  consumers  of  England  will  consent  to  pay  duties  on 
such  goods  as  compete  with  English  labor  in  the  home  mar 
ket,  and  relieve  from  taxation  the  tea,  coffee,  sugar,  currants, 
raisins,  tobacco,  and  spirits  of  the  laboring  classes,  rather 
than  incur  the  risk  of  widespread  famine  in  London,  Lanca 
shire,  and  other  great  industrial  centres  of  the  county.  But, 
were  the}r  capable  of  the  fatuity  of  withholding  their  consent, 
the  question  has  passed  from  their  decision.  Their  last  con 
cession  to  the  popular  will,  the  extension  of  the  suffrage, 
makes  this  one  inevitable.  The  article  in  Blackwood,  alreacty 
referred  to,  thus  defines  the  position  of  the  question : 

"A  new  power  has  been  introduced  into  our  political  sys 
tem,  new  forces  are  at  work  within  the  pale  of  the  Constitu 
tion.  The  Government  has  become  National  in  the  fullest 
sense  of  the  word  ;  and  with  the  change  a  new  breath  of  life 
is  stirring  society.  New  views  are  rapidly  forming;  new 
hopes  and  aspirations  are  entering  into  the  heart  of  the 
masses.  The  rule  of  the  middle  classes  established  by  the 
Reform  Bill  of  1 832,  has  come  to  an  end  ;  and  the  doctrines 
which  regulated  the  legislation  of  that  period  are  now  being 
tested  and  considered  from  a  different,  indeed  opposite  point 
of  view. 

"  For  nearly  forty  years  the  prime  object  of  our  legis 
lation  has  been  the  interests  of  the  Consumers  ;  now,  we 
shall  soon  have  the  masses  advocating  their  own  interests  as 
Producers.  What  is  more,  the  State  has  now  become  simply 
the  nation  itself,  acting  through  a  chosen  body  of  adminis 
trators;  and  it  is  easy  to  discern  that  under  the  new  regime 
the  Government  will  be  called  upon  to  adopt  a  very  different 
policy  in  domestic  affairs  from  that  represented  by  the  prin 
ciple  of  the  Whigs  and  doctrinaires,  which  has  been  para 
mount  since  1832.  That  principle  well  suited  the  interests 
of  the  wealthy  and  comparatively  fortunate  classes,  who 
needed  no  help  from  the  State,  yet  who  got  all  they  asked 
for,  by  the  abolition  of  all  custom  duties  which  shackled 
their  business.  But  will  that  principle  keep  its  ground  now 
that  the  weaker  classes  also  have  a  voice  in  the  Government  ? 


INTRODUCTION.  XV11 

Will  they  not  maintain  that  they,  as  an  integral  part  of  the 
nation,  have  a  claim  to  be  fully  considered  in  the  policy  of 
the  Government ;  and  that,  if  they  can  point  out  any  system 
of  governmental  action  which  will  benefit  them,  without 
doing  injustice  to  the  rest  of  the  community,  no  doctrinaire 
limitations  upon  the  actions  of  the  State  shall  be  allowed  to 
stand  in  the  way  ?  The  maxims  of  the  Liberals,  which  have 
been  predominant  since  1832,  will  be  thrown  into  the  crucible 
and  tried  anew.  Already  in  vague  murmurs,  which  ere  long 
will  become  distinct  and  earnest  speech,  the  masses  are  be 
ginning  to  say  that  the  principles  which  have  been  in  vogue 
during  the  rule  of  the  middle  classes  will  not  suit  them. 
'  Our  interests,'  they  say,  '  are  those  of  Producers,  not  of 
Consumers. 

"  *  We  also  are  poor,  and  you  arc  wealthy ;  we  are  weak, 
and  you  are  strong;  with  ns  employment  is  a  far  more  pre 
carious  thing  than  it  is  with  you,  and.  we  have  but  small 
earnings  to  fall  back  upon  when  out  of  work.  State  help, 
though  not  needful  to  the  middle  classes,  is  needed  at  times 
by  us  ;  and  we  shall  never  rest  contented  until  that  principle 
is  acknowledged  and  properly  applied.' " 

The  government  cannot  long  refuse  to  listen  to  this  de 
mand,  which  no  longer  comes  from  the  laboring  classes  alone, 
but  is  enforced  by  many  such  writers  as  those  to  whom  I  am 
indebted  for  many  of  my  most  instructive  notes,  and  now  by 
Blackwood,  the  Quarterly  Reviews,  and  other  great  organs 
of  opinion.  That  school  of  political  economists  who  pro 
pound  free  trade  as  the  result  of  their  system  is  finding  less 
favor  with  the  thinkers  of  England  than  heretofore.  They 
discover  that  it  is  not  producing  the  results  it  promised,  but 
other  and  very  different  ones,  and  are  demanding  that  it  be 
tested  by  the  inductive  system,  and  proven  by  the  facts  of 
experience.  It  has  become  clear  to  many  of  them  that 
under  its  influence  the  working  people  are  not  prosperous 
or  contented ;  that  the  home  market  for  some  of  their  great 
staples  diminishes  steadily  ;  and  that  in  spite  of  Government 
assurances  that  British  trade  increases,  it  is  stationary,  if 
not  absolutely  diminishing.  Discarding  statements  prepared 
by  skilful  statistical  jugglers  like  Mr.  Wells,  our  late  Com 
rnissioner  of  Revenue,  they  are  comparing  and  analyzing  re 
sults  for  themselves,  and  have  thus  detected  the  fraudulent 
practices  by  which  the3r  have  been  deceived.  The  last  trick 
British  statistics  have  been  made  to  pl&y  was  by  her  Majest3r's 
Commissioners  of  Customs,  who,  to  prove  the  steady  in 
crease  of  trade,  proclaimed  with  much  triumph  that  the  ex 
ports  during  1870  were  11  per  cent,  greater  than  they  were 
in  1868.  This  cheering  result,  which,  isolated  from  the  gen 
eral  facts  to  which  it  is  related,  is  true,  is  made  to  prove  the 


XVlil  INTRODUCTION'. 

steady  increase  of  trade  by  a  device  that  would  do  no  dis 
credit  to  the  cunning  and  audacity  of  our  great  statistical 
manipulator.  This  is  the  process  by  which  it  is  done. 
The  French  army  moved  toward  the  German  frontier  about 
the  15th  of  July,  1870,  and  at  the  close  of  the  year  the  war 
was  at  its  height,  promising  not  only  to  be  of  long  dura 
tion,  but  threatening  to  involve  all  Europe.  It  caused  a 
general  suspension  of  the  industries  of  France  and  Germany, 
whose  wares  and  fabrics  were  crowding  those  of  England 
out  of  so  many  markets,  or  the  employment  of  their  opera 
tives  in  the  production  of  arms  and  munitions  of  war.  It 
also  gave  England  an  immense  market  for  these.  But  what 
was,  perhaps,  more  important  than  all  this,  it  caused  the 
withdrawal  of  the  commercial  marine  of  those  countries  from 
the  ocean,  and  gave  the  ships  and  shops  of  England  a  mo 
nopoly  of  the  carrying  and  foreign  trade  of  the  world.  Her 
trade  could  not  fail  to  be  exceptionally  large  that  year,  as 
owing  to  the  war  having  extended  far  into  it,  and  been  pro 
longed  by  the  folly  of  the  Commune  it  will  be  this  year. 
The  Commissioners  of  Customs  prove  the  virtues  of  free 
trade  by  contrasting  the  exports  of  this  exceptional  year 
with  those  of  1868,  in  which  they  were  lower  than  they  have 
been  since  1865.  The  following  official  figures  will  suffice  to 
show  that  the  exports  from  Great  Britain  for  the  last  four 
years,  including  1810,  which  was  so  exceptionalljr  large,  have 
on  the  average  been  less  than  during  1866  by  the  consider 
able  sum  of  more  than  $6,700,000  per  annum : 

1866.  Total  value  of  British  Exports £188,917,536 

1867.  "  "  "  181,183,971 

1868.  "  "  «  179,463,644 

1S69.  "  «  «  189,953,957 

1870.  "  "  "  199,649,938 

The  reader  who  will  add  the  value  of  the  four  years,  '67-70, 
and  divide  the  result  by  four,  and  compare  the  figures  thus 
obtained  with  the  total  exports  of  1866,  will  ascertain  pre 
cisely  how  rapidly  and  steadily  the  trade  of  Great  Britain 
increases. 

Mr.  Syme,  in  the  course  of  his  article  in  the  Westminster 
Review,  to  which  I  have  referred,  says  :  "  Political  Economy 
exhibits  no  sign  of  progressiveness.  Instead  of  discoveries, 
of  which  we  have  had  none  of  any  consequence  since 
Adam  Smith's  time,  we  have  had  endless  disputation  and 
setting  up  of  dogmas.  Whatever  progress  may  have  been 
made  in  other  sciences  during  the  last  century,  there  has 
been  none  in  this.  The  most  elementary  principles  are 
still  matters  of  dispute.  The  doctrine  of  free  trade,  for 
instance,  which  is  looked  upon  as  the  crowning  triumph 
of  Political  Economy,  is  still  very  far  from  being  uni 
versally  recognized.  Even  in  England,  after  twenty  years' 


INTRODUCTION.  XIX 

trial  under  most  favorable  circumstances,  free  trade  has 
been  put  upon  its  defence.  We  make  no  progress,  and 
from  the  very  nature  of  our  method  of  investigation,  we  can 
make  none.  The  Political  Economist  observes  phenomena 
with  a  foregone  conclusion  as  to  their  cause.  His  method. 
in  fact,  is  the  method  of  the  savage.  The  phenomena  of 
nature,  the  thunder,  the  lightning,  or  the  earthquake,  strike 
the  savage  with  awe  and  wonder;  but  he  only  looks  within 
himself  for  an  explanation  of  these  phenomena.  To  him, 
therefore,  the  forces  of  nature  are  only  the  efforts  of  beings 
like  himself,  great  and  powerful,  no  doubt,  but  with  good 
and  evil  propensities,  and  subject  to  every  human  caprice. 
Like  the  Political  Economist,  he  works  within  the  vicious 
circle  of  his  own  feelings,  and  he  cannot  comprehend,  any 
more  than  the  savage,  how  he  can  discover  the  laws  which 
regulate  the  phenomena  which  he  sees  around  him.  The 
savage  would  reduce  the  Divine  mind  to  the  dimensions  of 
the  human  ;  the  Political  Economist  would  reduce  the  human 
mind  to  the  dimensions  of  his  ideal. 

"  Our  conclusion  is,  that  the  inductive  method  is  alone 
applicable  to  the  investigation  of  economic  science,  and  that 
we  shall  never  be  able  to  make  any  solid  progress  so  long 
as  we  continue  to  follow  the  a  priori  method — a  method 
which  has  not  aided,  but  clogged  and  fettered  us  in  the  pur 
suit  of  truth,  and  which  is  utterly  alien  to  the  spirit  of  mod 
ern  scientific  inquiry." 

For  the  edification  of  those  who  may  be  incredulous  as  to 
free  trade  being  on  its  defence  in  England,  Mr.  Syme  refers 
to  Professor  Bonamy  Price's  arraignment  of  it  in  the  Con 
temporary  Review  of  February,  1871.* 

The  London  Quarterly  Review  for  July  [1871],  contains 
a  spirited  article  on  "  Economical  Fallacies  and  Labor  Uto 
pias,"  in  which  it  handles  with  great  freedom  "  the  school  of 
political  economists  now  in  the  ascendant."  The  date  at 
which  it  was  published  proves  that  the  author  could  not 
have  seen  the  article  entitled  "  Free  Trade1 — Revenue  Re 
form,"  in  our  Atlantic  for  October,  yet  he  says :  "  There  is 
an  utopianism  which  counts  its  chickens  before  they  are 
hatched,  nay,  cackles  over  chickens  it  expects  to  hatch  from 
eggs  that  are  addled."  Referring  to  Mr.  John  Stuart  Mill, 
who,  had  the  Atlantic's  article  been  anonymous,  might,  from 
the  freedom  with  which  it  disposes  of  existing  relations  and 
interests,  well  have  been  suspected  of  its  authorship,  the 
Quarterly  proceeds  to  sa}^: 

"If  Mr.  Mill,  the  recognized  leader  of  that  school,  is  to  be 
designated  as  an  economical  'enthusiast,' or  perhaps  more 

*  See  also  remarks  of  Sir  John  Byles  and  Mr.  R.  II.  Patterson,  in  notes, 
pages  199  and  200 ;  and  also  of  Sir  Edward  Sullivan,  in  note,  pages  378,  379. 


XX  INTRODUCTION. 

properly  as  the  founder  and  propagator  of  economical  en 
thusiasm,  he  has  earned  that  designation  more  by  the  exces 
sive  exercise  of  the  dialectical  than  of  the  imaginative  faculty, 
and  does  not  so  much  body  forth  to  himself  the  forms  of 
things  unknown,  as  suggest  to  his  disciples  revolutions,  un 
realized  even  in  imagination,  of  all  existing  relations  between 
classes  and  sexes,  as  logically  admissible,  and  not  to  be 
set  aside  as  practically  chimerical  without  actual  experiment. 
His  enthusiasm  is  the  speculative  passion  of  starting  ever 
fresh  game  in  the  wide  field  of  abstract  social  possibilities — • 
philosophically  indifferent  to  all  objections  drawn  from  the 
actual  conditions  of  men,  women,  or  things  in  the  concrete. 
Mr.  Mill  would  be  very  capable,  like  Condorcet,  of  deriving 
from  the  doctrine  of  human  perfectibility  the  inference  that 
there  was  no  demonstrable  reason  why  the  duration  of  human 
life  might  not  be  prolonged  indefinitely  by  discoveries  (here 
after  to  be  made)  in  hygiene.  And  to  all  objections  drawn 
from  universal  human  experience  of  the  growth  and  decay 
of  vital  power  within  a  limited  period,  it  would  be  quite  in 
the  character  of  his  mind  and  temper  to  reply  calmly  that 
the  life  of  man,  like  the  genius  of  woman,  had  not  hitherto 
been  developed  under  such  conditions  as  to  draw  out  its 
capabilities  to  the  full  extent.  Like  Condorcet,  too,  while 
dealing  perturbation  all  around  him,  Mr.  Mill  is  impertur 
bable,  and  might  be  described  as  he  was,  as  '  un  mouton  en 
rage — un  Volcan  convert  de  neige  !  '  " 

It  was  the  opinion  of  the  great  Bonaparte,  that  Political 
Economy  would  grind  empires  to  powder,  though  they  were 
made  of  adamant.  The  British  Government  is  proving  the 
excellence  of  his  judgment,  and  schoolmen  and  theorists  are 
industriously  laboring  to  induce  the  American  people  to 
confirm  it  by  even  a  grander  illustration.  This  pretended 
science  which,  Mr.  Mill  says,  "  necessarily  reasons  from  as 
sumptions,  and  not  from  facts,"  is  sedulously  and  devoutly 
taught  at  Yale,  and  most  of  our  leading  colleges.  It  is  for- 
tunat%  that  the  intimate  relations  of  many  of  the  students 
with  the  industries  and  people  of  the  country  render  the 
scholasticisms  of  their  teachers  harmless ;  and  in  parting 
from  them,  they  sometimes  throw  back  upon  them  the 
terrible  results  of  experience,  as  their  reply  to  the  weary 
chapters  of  deductions  from  assumptions  with  which  they 
have  been  tortured.  How  boldly  and  aptly,  yet  respectfully 
this  may  be  done,  was  shown  by  Mr.  Orville  Justus  Bliss, 
of  Chicago,  at  Yale's  last  commencement.  A  leading  scholar 
of  his  class,  he  had  been  selected  to  deliver  the  Valedictory, 
in  the  course  of  which  he  said : 

"A  cry  for  relief  has  gone  forth,  and  refuses  to  be  hushed 


INTRODUCTION".  XXI 

We  cannot  always  ignore  these  men.  Neither  can  we  for 
ever  satisfy  them  by  quoting  Adam  Smith.  Suppose  some 
wise  individual  should  stand  with  a  copy  of  '  The  Wealth 
of  Nations '  in  his  hand  before  a  mob  of  London  bread- 
rioters,  and  begin  to  read  the  chapter  on  wages  ;  would  they 
all  go  off  rejoicing  in  the  beauties  of  the  science,  and  con 
vinced  that  they  were  happy  ?  Political  Economy  has  had 
ample  trial  in  England.  A  mill  agent  recently  said,  '  I  re 
gard  my  work  people  just  as  I  regard  my  machinery.  So 
long  as  they  can  do  my  work  for  what  I  choose  to  pay  them, 
I  keep  them,  getting  out  of  them  all  I  can.  When  my 
machines  get  old  and  useless,  I  reject  them,  and  get  new ; 
and  these  people  are  part  of  my  machinery.'  Is  not  that  a 
sufficientl}T  rigorous  application  of  the  law  of  demand  and 
supply  ?  And  it  describes  the  whole  factoiy  system  in  Eng 
land,  up  to  the  time  when  the  agitators  took  it  in  hand. 
What  it  has  done  for  England,  I  need  not  repeat.  Suffice  it 
to  say,  that  Political  Economy,  as  a  solution  of  this  question, 
is  a  disastrous  failure." 

And  again :  "  The  poor  cannot  help  themselves.  They 
are  tied  hand  and  foot  with  an  enslaving  destitution.  We 
say :  '  It  is  a  free  country  ;  let  every  one  make  of  himself  as 
much  as  he  can.'  We  challenge  one  and  all  to  an  unbounded 
competition.  But  to  these  people  the  seeming  fairness  is 
mockery.  It  rivals  the  brave  boy  who  first  takes  a  good 
long  start,  and  then  turns  around  and  offers  to  race  with  you 
to  the  next  corner.  The  child  of  the  laborer  may  lift  him 
self  from  his  degradation,  and  become  a  power  for  good. 
But  there  must  be  some  measure  of  intelligence,  to  serve  as 
a  basis  upon  which  to  build.  They  must  be  made  to  feel 
that  society  is  their  friend,  not  an  enemy,  whose  prosperity 
is  their  defeat.  What,  then,  is  the  laying  of  a  cable,  or  the 
spanning  of  a  continent?  What  beauty  do  they  find  in 
literature,  what  exaltation  in  science — I  had  almost  said, 
what  solace  in  religion  ?  Not  in  the  name  of  an  endangered 
society,  imminent  as  its  peril  is  ;  not  in  the  interests  of  great 
monej'-wielders,  plainly  as  those  interests  point  to  educated 
labor,  do  I  plead  the  cause  of  these  people ;  but  because 
they  are  part  of  our  common  humanity,  and  have  a  right  to 
partake  of  our  common,  intellectual,  aesthetic,  and  social 
delight." 

I  have  said  that  I  believe  England  will  soon  readopt  many 
of  the  distinctive  principles  of  the  protective  system.  Un 
less  we  determine  otherwise,  she  must  do  this  soon.  Her 
newly  enfranchised  producers  will  demand  it,  and  the  action 
of  her  colonies  will  impart  vehemence  to  the  demand.  Pro 
tection  is  a  settled  principle  with  the  governments  of  Yu> 


XX11  INTRODUCTION-. 

toria,  New  South  Wales,  Queensland,  and  other  Australian 
colonies.  Speaking  of  this,  together  with  the  fact  that  they 
are  establishing  Customs  Unions  on  the  principle  of  the 
Zollverein,  Charles  Wentworth  Dilke,  in  his  Greater  Britain, 
says:  "  It  is  a  common  doctrine  in  the  colonies  of  England 
that  a  nation  cannot  be  called  'independent'  if  it  has  to  cry 
out  to  another  for  supplies  of  necessaries  ;  that  true  national 
existence  is  first  attained  when  the  country  becomes  capable 
of  supplying  to  its  own  citizens  those  goods  without  which 
they  cannot  exist  in  the  state  of  comfort  they  have  already 
reached.  Political  is  apt  to  follow  on  commercial  depen 
dency,  they  say."  After  a  somewhat  glowing  portrayal  of 
the  moral  beauty  of  cosmopolitanism  or  free  trade,  Mr. 
Dilke,  recurring  to  the  colonies,  says :  "  On  the  other  hand, 
it  may  be  argued  that  if  every  State  consults  the  good  of  its 
own  citizens,  we  shall,  by  the  action  of  all  nations,  obtain 
the  desired  happiness  of  the  whole  world,  and  this  with 
rapidity,  from  the  reason  that  every  country  understands 
its  own  interests  better  than  it  does  those  of  its  neighbor. 
Asa  rule,  the  colonists  hold  that  they  should  not  protect 
themselves  against  the  sister  colonies,  but  only  against  the 
outer  world  ;  and  while  I  was  in  Melbourne  an  arrangement 
was  made  with  respect  to  the  border  trade  between  Victoria 
and  New  South  Wales;  but  this  is  at  present  (1868)  the 
only  step  that  has  been  taken  toward  inter-colonial  Free 
Trade." 

The  British  Government  cannot,  without  our  consent,  main 
tain  its  present  revenue  system  for  five  years  more.  But  we 
may  enable  it  to  postpone  the  change  a  few  3^ears  longer, 
inasmuch  as  by  maintaining  our  workshops  in  England 
rather  than  in  the  United  States,  we  can  soothe  popular 
discontent  by  giving  employment  to  her  hundreds  of  thou 
sands  of  unemployed  workers.  This  would  also  not  only 
increase  her  foreign  trade,  but  by  enabling  those  who  are 
now  idle  and  requiring  support  to  earn  wages  and  purchase 
supplies,  would,  till  we  should  again  reach  bankruptcy,  re 
vive  her  home  market.*  To  repeal  or  reduce  our  protective 
duties,  while  our  people  are  burdened  by  the  annual  levy  of 
more  than  $100,000,000  of  internal  taxes,  is  the  only  method 
by  which  the  languishing  trade  and  industry  of  England 
can  be  materially  invigorated  under  her  present  free  "trade 
revenue  system. f  Should  the  American  people  conclude  that 
cheap  goods  for  cash  constitute  the  chief  end  of  men  and  na 
tions,  and  that  their  interests  will  be  best  served  by  having 

*  See  extract  from  Ryland's  Iron  Trade  Circular,  in  note,  page  405. 
f  See  extract  from   Our  National  Resources,  and  how  theii  are    Wasted,  bv 
Win.  Hoyle,  page  103. 


INTRODUCTION  XX111 

their  ores  smelted,  and  their  pig-iron,  railroad  bars,  Besse 
mer  and  cast-steel,  chemicals,  cotton  and  woolen  goods,  and 
other  wares  and  fabrics,  made  in  foreign  lands  by  people  whose 
food  is  raised  by  the  ill-fed  peasants  of  Russia,  Prussia,  Aus 
tria,  and  Turkey,  the  discontented  artisans  of  England  will 
probably  be  pacified,  and  the  emigration  of  her  skilled  work 
men  to  this  country  be  arrested  for  a  decade.  What  the 
farmers  of  the  Mississippi  Yalley  would  do  with  their  crops 
meanwhile,  is  a  question  worthy  of  their  consideration. 

But  I  may  remark  that  it  was  the  consideration  of  the 
question,  Where  shall  the  farmers  of  America  find  a  steady 
and  remunerative  market  for  their  crops  ?  that  confirmed  my 
adherence  to  protection.  The  circumstances  were  these :  In 
1859,  during  the  period  of  doubt  heretofore  referred  to,  I 
sought  the  privilege  of  renewing  a  neglected  intimacy  with 
Henry  C.  Care3r,  to  whom  I  have  since  gone,  and  never  in 
vain,  when  troubled  by  doubt  on  any  economic  question. 
Hitherto,  our  intercourse  had  been  that  of  earnest  adherents 
of  conflicting  systems,  but  henceforth  it  was  to  be  that  of 
friends  in  council,  or  rather  of  teacher  and  pupil.  I  already 
recognized  the  fact  that  with  their  surplus  capital,  immense 
sums  of  which  are  invested  in  our  bonds  and  those  of  other 
nations  which  pay  as  high  rates  of  interest  as  we  do,  it  was 
always  possible  for  English  manufacturers,  in  every  depart 
ment  of  production,  to  combine,  and  by  selling  their  goods, 
for  a  season  or  two,  in  this  one  of  their  many  markets,  at 
rates  slightly  below  their  actual  cost,  to  destroy  their  Ameri 
can  rivals,  whose  capital  was  not  often  adequate  to  the  de 
mands  of  their  business,  and  who,  when  compelled  to  borrow, 
were  subject  to  high  rates  of  interest.*  And  I  also  knew  that 
the  workingmen  of  this  country  could  not  maintain  homes 
and  rear  and  educate  families  on  such  wages  as  those  of 
other  countries  were  compelled  to  receive.  But  the  question 
that  gave  me  difficulty  was  (for  such  I  mistakenly  supposed 
must  be  a  result  of  protection),  why  should  the  farmer  be 
taxed  to  defend  the  manufacturer  and  his  employees  against 
such  conspiracies,  and  this  inevitable,  though  fatal,  competi 
tion  ?  This  apparent  conflict  of  interest  it  was  at  which  I 
halted,  and  the  service  Mr.  Carey  rendered  me  was  that  of 
showing  me  that  no  such  conflict  existed ;  but  that,  on  the 
contrary,  the  prosperity  of  the  American  farmer  did  then,  and 
always  must,  depend  on  the  steady  employment  of  the  Ameri 
can  miner,  artisan,  and  laborer,  at  such  wages  as  would  enable 
them  and  their  families  to  be  free  consumers  of  the  produc 
tions  of  the  field,  the  orchard,  and  the  dairy.  A\7ith  the  clear 

*    See  extract  from  Report  of  Parliamentary  Commission,  in  note,  page  328. 


INTRODUCTION. 

perception  of  this  truth,  that,  at  least  in  the  United  States, 
the  prosperity  of  the  farmer  is  dependent  on  that  of  the  manu 
facturer,  and  the  prosperity  of  the  manufacturer  equally  de 
pendent  on  that  of  the  farmer  ;  and  that,  in  so  far  there  was 
no  conflict,  but  an  absolute  harmony  of  interests  between 
them,  I  became  a  protectionist.  My  last  doubt  had  been  re 
moved,  for  I  now  saw  that  the  Protective  System  was  not 
chargeable  with  the  selfish  exclusiveness  I  had  ascribed  to 
it,  but  was,  in  fact,  the  truest  and  most  beneficent  cosmo 
politanism  ;  nay,  more,  that  it  was  essential  to  the  enjoy 
ment  of  absolutely  free  trade  by  the  American  people. 

Let  me  hastily  demonstrate  the  truth  of  these  proposi 
tions.  Trade  is  most  free  when  there  is  an  active  and 
remunerative  demand  for  all  the  commodities  that  can  be 
produced ;  and  this  is  when  the  people  are  so  generally  em 
ployed  in  remunerative  pursuits  that  the  number  steadily 
increases  of  those  who,  by  their  earnings,  can,  while  supply 
ing  themselves  and  families  with  the  average  necessaries 
and  conveniences  provided  by  modern  civilization,  accumu 
late  sufficient  capital  to  enable  them  to  change  their  busi 
ness,  or  vicinage,  as  inclination,  health,  or  circumstances  may 
dictate.  In  other  words,  trade  is  most  free  when  the  great 
est  number  of  people  are  able  to  buy  or  sell,  to  work  or  rest, 
to  spend  money  in  travel,  or  for  a  coveted  luxuiy — or 
to  deposit  the  amount  required  for  this  in  a  savings  bank,  or 
purchase  therewith  an  interest-bearing  bond.  The  authors 
from  whose  .works  most  of  the  notes  by  which  I  have  en 
forced  the  doctrines  of  my  addresses  and  letters  have  been 
taken,  prove  that  the  number  of  the  people  of  England,  Ire 
land,  Scotland,  and  Wales  who  enjoy  these  conditions,  is 
steadily  diminishing ;  that  there  are  more  than  a  million  in 
habitants  of  these  countries  who  are  vagrants,  and  more  than 
another  million  who  are  paupers;  and  that  this  is  not  because 
they  were  born  to  pauperism  and  vagrane}^  but  because,  at 
least  in  a  large  majority  of  cases,  they  cannot  get  work 
whereby  they  may  earn  the  means  of  independent  subsist 
ence.*  As  freedom  from  customs  duties  does  not  establish 
free  trade,  it  has  not  enabled  them  to  sell  or  buy  freely.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  farmers  of  Minnesota,  Iowa,  Nebraska, 
Kansas,  Missouri,  and  Arkansas  find  that  there  is  such  a 
surplus  of  food  in  the  world  that  their  trade  is  greatly  re 
stricted.  Having  all  raised  grain  and  live  stock,  there  is  no 
chance  for  commerce  between  them,  and  though  we  are  im 
porting  vastly  more  foreign  goods  than  ever  before,  they  can- 

*  See  statements  of  Grant,  Sullivan,  Kirk,  Hoyle,  R.  Dudley  Baxter,  Smith, 
and  Patterson,  in  notes,  pages  24-5,  195-7,  267-9,  338-9,  and  422. 


INTRODUCTION.  XXV 

not  find  a  market  for  their  productions  at  prices  that  will  re 
imburse  the  cost  of  production.  These  States  abound  in  the 
ores  of  iron,  copper,  lead,  zinc,  nickel,  and  other  metals,  and 
in  fuel  and  water-power.  They  all  raise  wool,  some  of  them 
cotton,  and  Arkansas  is  a  natural  silk  field,  in  every  quarter 
of  which  the  mulberry  tree  is  indigenous  ;  but  these  exhaust- 
less  stores  of  the  elements  of  wealth,  and  the  forces  whereby 
they  may  be  utilized,  have  been  neglected.  Had  they  been 
largely  appropriated,  there  would  be  no  glut  in  the  grain 
markets  of  these  States.  Trade  throughout  their  limits  would 
be  both  free  and  active.  Many  of  the  vagrants  and  paupers 
of  England  have  the  skill  to  mine  and  smelt  ores;  to  convert 
them  into  wares ;  to  spin  wool,  cotton,  and  silk — weave  them 
into  fabrics,  and  color  them  with  exquisite  skill  and  taste. 
Can  we  not,  in  lieu  of  homesteads,  offer  such  of  their  skilled 
countiymen  as  still  have  the  ability  to  come,  steady  work  at 
such  generous  wages  as  will  tempt  a  million  or  two  of  them 
— miners,  smelters,  engineers,  machinists,  spinners,  weavers, 
dyers,  and  other  classes  of  artisans — to  come  and  open  the 
mines  of  those  States,  build  and  work  furnaces,  forges, 
rolling-mills,  and  factories  ?  This  would  not  only  give  their 
farmers  free  trade,  but  by  building  up  towns,  and  requiring 
local  railroads,  quadruple  the  price  of  every  acre  they  own.* 
This  can  only  be  done  by  putting  Protection  on  the  founda 
tion  of  a  settled  polic}r,  for  who  will  in  vest  capital  in  mines,  mills, 
or  furnaces  to  stand  idle  while  we  go  abroad  for  our  wares 
and  fabrics  ?  Or  why  should  intelligent  artisans  come  here  to 
be  idle,  or  work  for  such  wages  as  they  can  earn  at  home  ?  The 
farmer  should  have  a  liberal  price  for  his  grain,  but  to  live 
well  and  enjoy  free  trade  he  must  let  others  live,  not 
grudging  the  laborer  generous  wages  for  his  work,  or  with 
holding  from  enterprise  and  capital  just  guarantees  of  a  fail- 
return  for  their  efforts  at  developing  the  resources  of  a  new 
country.  Could  a  million  of  English  people,  the  adults 
being,  not  farmers  but  miners,  smelters,  machinists,  engine 
builders,  spinners,  weavers,  dyers,  and  artisans  generally, 
be  induced  to  settle  in  the  States  I  have  named,  and  pursue 
their  respective  callings,  the  glut  in  the  grain  market  would 
soon  disappear,  and  the  freest  trade  would  prevail  between 
them  and  the  farmers.  By  the  pre-emption  and  homestead 
laws,  we  are  tempting  agricultural  immigrants  to  come  by 
tens  of  thousands  annually  to  increase  our  production  of 
grain  and  live  stock.  Protection  to  high  wages  is  needed 
to  bring  other  classes.  The  homestead  on  which  nothing 
marketable  can  be  raised  will  prove  but  a  poor  boon  to  the 


See  notes,  pages  202  and  360-1. 


XXVI  INTRODUCTION. 

immigrant.  And  by  promoting  the  immigration  of  arti 
sans,  we  should  render  to  the  impoverished  masses  of  England 
the  highest  service.  By  making  prosperous  American  citi 
zens  of  a  million  of  them,  we  should  improve  the  chances  in 
life  of  those  who  remained  behind.  The  prosperity  that  would 
result  from  the  infusion  of  such  an  immigration  into  even  the 
remotely  interior  States  I  have  named,  would  quicken  the 
trade  of  England;  for  a  prosperous  people  always  consume 
freely,  irrespective  of  the  money  price  of  commodities.  They 
will  not  only  satisfy  their  wants,  but  gratify  their  desires  ; 
and  our  importations  are  always  largest  when,  under  pro 
tective  duties,  our  labor  and  machinery  are  most  fully  em 
ployed.  The  present  is  a  striking  illustration  of  this  fact. 

The  existing  tariff  is  highly  protective.  With  a  larger 
free  list  of  raw  materials  than  ever  before,  the  rate  of  duty 
averages,  I  believe,  about  40  per  cent. ;  yet,  our  imports  are 
vastly  in  excess  of  any  former  year.  How  are  we  to  account 
for  this  paradox  ?  Thus :  We  are  prosperous,  and  a  pros 
perous  people  will  gratify  their  desires.  The  value  of  our 
foreign  imports  during  the  last  fiscal  year  was  nearly  22  per 
cent,  greater  than  those  of  any  preceding  one.  In  the  year 
ending  June  30th,  1866,  they  amounted  to  $444,811,066,  but 
did  not  attain  this  magnitude  again  till  that  which  ended  with 
June,  1871,  during  which  they  exceeded  it  by  nearly  $100,000,- 
000,  having  been  $541,493,776.  This  increased  importation 
of  foreign  goods  surprises  no  intelligent  protectionist.  It  but 
confirms  his  theory  that  protection  is  the  pathway  to  free 
trade :  that  a  well  protected  and  generous  home  market  is 
the  only  basis  on  which  extended  foreign  trade  can  be  main 
tained.*  When,  as  is  the  case  at  present,  customs  duties 
are  so  adjusted  as  to  countervail  the  lower  rates  of  wages 
and  interest  prevailing  in  competing  countries,  increased 
importations  do  not  come  as  they  would  under  free  trade, 
to  undermine  and  destroy  our  industries,  but  to  supplement 
them.  Our  productive  power  increases  more  rapidly  than 
our  imports,  and  we  are  producing  each  }7ear  a  greater  per 
centage  of  our  total  consumption.  But  rapid  as  is  the  in 
crease  of  our  productive  power,  such  is  our  general  pros 
perity  that  our  ability  to  purchase  and  consume  tasks  it  to 
its  utmost  in  all  departments  save  that  of  farming.  This 
is  shown  by  the  fact  that  in  those  departments  in  which  our 
production  has  increased  most  steadily  and  rapidly,  the 
home  demand  is  so  active  and  remunerative  that  it  saves  us 
from  sending  so  many  of  our  goods  as  we  did  in  less  pros 
perous  seasons  to  foreign  markets  for  sale  in  competition 

*  See  note,  page  10. 


INTRODUCTION.  XXV11 

with  the  cheaper  goods  of  Germany  and  England.  If  readers 
desire  proof  that  such  is  the  case,  they  will  find  it  on  page 
125,  of  the  July  number  of  the  North  American  Review, 
where  Mr.  Wells  enumerates  a  number  of  articles  of  wuich 
we  export  less  than  we  did  in  1860,  and  points  to  that  fact 
as  evidence  of  declining  prosperity.  Every  reader  will 
recognize  the  fact  that  our  production  of  each  of  the  articles 
named  by  him  has  increased  in  a  ratio  exceeding  that  of  our 
increase  of  population,  and  see  that  the  circumstance  from 
which  the  writer  cunningly  suggests  our  failing  condition, 
is  pregnant  proof  of  our  increased  prosperity,  our  power  to 
purchase  and  consume  more  than  ever  before.  I  may  re 
mark,  in  passing,  that  this  is  but  a  fair  illustration  of  the 
unscrupulous  ingenuity  that  has  characterized  the  writings 
of  Mr.  Wells  since  his  return  from  England. 

Without  free  access  to  our  markets,  England  cannot  find 
emplo3rment  for  her  people  or  capital;  but  as  our  tariff,  by 
defending  the  home  market,  invites  enterprise,  her  capital 
and  people  can  find  profitable  employment  in  developing  our 
resources,  and  both  are  coming.*  Thus  reinforced,  we  are 
producing  such  a  proportion  of  our  own  wares  and  fabrics, 
including  those  consumed  by  the  cotton  planters  and  tobacco 
growers  of  the  South,  that  we  can  afford  to  receive  in  luxu 
ries,  or  such  necessaries  as  we  need  in  excess  of  our  capacity 
to  produce,  part  of  the  proceeds  of  those  special  agricultural 
supplies  which  Europe  takes  from  us  because  they  cannot  be 
obtained  elsewhere.  This  must  be  the  solution  of  the  para 
dox,  for  while  augmenting  our  imports  so  largely,  we 
are  producing  not  only  vastly  more  iron,  steel,  lead, 
copper,  zinc,  and  the  infinite  variet}7  of  utilities  into  which 
they  may  be  converted;  of  cotton,  woollen,  silk,  and  flax 
goods  ;  of  chemicals,  clocks,  watches,  jewelry,  and  works  of 
art,  than  ever  before;  but  of  "dwelling-houses,  cooking- 
stoves,  furnaces,  pumps,  carriages,  harnesses,  tin-ware, 
agricultural  tools,  books,  hats,  clothing,  wheat,  flour,  cheese, 
steamboats,  cars,  locomotives,  bricks,  coal  oil,  fire  engines, 
furniture,  marble-work,  mattresses,  printing-presses,  wooden- 
ware,  newspapers,"  and  a  thousand  other  things,  which,  it 
is  falsely  said,  "  cannot  be  imported  to  any  great  extent, 
under  any  circumstances,"  and  the  production  of  which  gives 
"to  the  farmer  by  far  the  largest  market  for  his  produce." 
So  great  indeed  is  the  prosperit}r  of  all  classes,  save  those 
farmers  who  have  gone  beyond  the  reach  of  a  market,  that 
Mr.  Atkinson,  in  his  onslaught  on  Protection  in  the  Atlantic 
Monthly,  is  constrained  to  acknowledge  that :  "  At  the  pres 
ent  time  this  country  is  so  vigorous,  and  production  so 
great,  that  a  vicious  currency  and  an  enormous  tariff  simply 

I  *  See  note  from  Kirk,  page  389. 


XXVlii  INTRODUCTION. 

appear  to  create  uneasiness,  but  do  not  seriously  impede 
prosperity." 

To  have  withheld  such  an  admission,  damaging  as  it  is  to 
the  author's  argument,  would  have  been  still  more  damaging. 
]t  gives  an  aspect  of  fairness  and  candor  to  an  article  that 
is  essentially  ingenious  and  disengenuous  ;  and  had  it  not 
been  made,  each  intelligent  reader  would  recall  the  prosper 
ous  condition  of  the  country  as  a  sufficient  reply  to  his  sug 
gestions  :  For  our  general  prosperity  is  not  known  and  felt 
by  oursel\7es  only,  but  by  the  British  people  and  government. 
The  Commissioners  of  Customs  state  that  the  amount  of  the 
manufactures  of  Great  Britain,  taken  by  the  United  States 
during  1870,  was  £28,335,394,  adding  that  this  is  "the 
largest  sum  ever  reached  in  any  year,  with  the  exception  of 
the  very  prosperous  year  of  1866,  when  the  values  were  £28,- 
499,514,  and  exceeding  the  value  of  the  exports  of  I860, 
the  year  before  the  American  war,  by  six  millions,  or  nearly 
31  per  cent."  It  is  not  unworthy  of  note  that  the  only  year 
in  which  our  British  imports  exceeded  those  of  last  year  was 
one  of  extreme  protection,  and  that  in  each  they  exceeded 
by  more  than  31  per  cent,  those  of  the  last  year  of  free 
trade,  or  a  revenue  tariff.  A  leading  English  journal,  over 
looking  the  fact  that  the  amount  had  ever  been  exceeded, 
says  :  "  The  United  States  have  long  been  the  best  customers 
the  British  manufacturers  have  had  throughout  the  world,  and 
last  year  their  pre-eminence  is  more  marked  than  ever." 

Thus  does  current  experience  attest  the  mutual  dependence 
of  the  American  farmer  and  manufacturer,  and  prove  that  for 
them  the  protective  system  is  the  only  road  to  really  Free 
Trade.  That  at  so  late  a  day,  as  it  did,  it  should  have  re 
quired  Mr.  Carey  to  convince  me  of  these  truths,  illustrates 
the  almost  absolute  dominion  long  cherished  abstractions 
obtain  over  the  minds  of  men ;  for  no  fact  in  our  history  is 
established  by  more  abounding  proof  than  the  dependence 
of  our  farmers  on  a  home  market  capable  of  consuming  more 
than  90  per  cent,  of  the  annual  crop  of  the  country.  It  is 
proven  anew  by  each  year's  experience,  and  strikingly  illus 
trated  by  the  statistics  and  general  results  of  each  of  the 
alternating  periods  of  Protective  and  Revenue  Tariffs.  A 
thorough  examination  of  these  results  will,  I  am  persuaded, 
convince  any  candid  mind  that  a  rigid  S}7stem  of  Protection 
must,  for  many  years,  be  the  paramount  political  necessity 
of  the  farmers  of  the  United  States. 

But,  waiving  historical  or  statistical  proof,  I  propose  to 
test  the  correctness  of  this  proposition  by  existing  facts. 
The  price  of  grain  is  not  satisfactory  to  our  farmers,  and,  as 
I  have  more  than  once  suggested,  is  not  sufficient  to  cover 
-the  cost  of  production  and  transportation  to  the  seaboard 


INTRODUCTION.  XXIX 

of  the  crops  of  the  trans-Mississippi  States.  Is  this  the  result 
of  an  unusually  fruitful  year  ?  By  no  means.  For  the  yield 
per  acre  throughout  the  country  has  been  considerably  below 
the  general  average.  It  is  because  too  large  a  proportion  of 
our  people  are  engaged  in  producing  grain,  and  have,  in  a 
year  in  which  the  foreign  demand  is  exceptionally  large, 
produced  it  in  excess  of  the  world's  demand.  The  leaders 
of  the  corn  market  of  England  watch  the  progress  of  the 
crops  of  the  Continent  as  closely  as  they  do  those  of  the 
British  Islands,  inasmuch  as  they  usually  draw  thence  from 
90  to  95  per  cent,  of  the  annual  deficiency.  And  their  ad 
vices  for  this  year  are  as  follows,  as  I  learn  from  one  of  their 
organs,  published  September  llth  :  "  The  great  deficiency  in 
the  area  under  wheat  on  the  Continent  (in  France  and  Ger 
many),  as  reported  by  us  in  May  last,  could  not  fail  to  show 
a  very  large  falling  off  in  their  crop  as  compared  with  1868 
and  1869,  and  hence,  instead  of  being  liberal  exporters  of 
grain  as  formerly,  they  will  require  to  import  freely  during 
the  year.  Our  late  advices  from  Russia  confirm  previous 
estimates  in  regard  to  their  crops,  viz.:  that  their  surplus 
of  wheat  will  be  10  per  cent,  less  than  last  year."  If,  under 
these  circumstances  there  be  no  market  for  our  crop,  when 
and  where  may  we  expect  to  find  one  ?  Certainly  the  near 
future  does  not  promise  a  European  one  ;  for  the  war  be 
tween  France  and  Germany  has  terminated,  and  the  peasants 
of  both  of  those  countries  are  preparing  their  fields  for  the 
production  of  the  usual  amount  of  grain  for  the  English 
market  in  1872.  Nor  is  the  remoter  prospect  more  promis 
ing.  The  increase  of  the  population  of  Europe  is  scarcely 
appreciable.  But  her  capitalists  adopt  improved  methods 
of  production,  and  the  rapid  extension  of  her  railroad  sys 
tem  is  bringing  her  interior  grain  fields  into  cheaper  and 
more  rapid  communication  with  her  capitals  and  seaports. 
Under  these  circumstances,  to  anticipate  a  steady  and  re 
munerative  trans- Atlantic  market  for  our  grain  would  be 
absurd.  And  what  is  the  outlook  at  home  ?  For  the  far 
mers  of  the  remote  interior  it  is  even  more  gloomy.  Our 
laws  offer  sublime  inducements  to  the  peasantry  of  the 
world  to  come  and  increase  our  production  of  grain.  To 
every  one  who  will  do  this,  they  offer  with  citizenship  and 
free  schools  a  farm  without  money  and  without  price ;  and 
constantly  increasing  tens  of  thousands  of  them  are  accepting 
the  offer  annually.  I  do  not  think  it  would  be  an  exaggera 
tion  to  place  the  number  of  new  farms  that  will  be  pre 
pared  for  crops  this  year,  in  the  six  States  I  have  heretofore 
named,  at  one  hundred  thousand.  Who  are  to  consume 
their  productions  ? 

Says  Professor  Kirk,  in  his  admirable  essays  on  "  Social 


XXX  INTRODUCTION". 

Politics  in  Groat  Britain  and  Ireland  : "  "  There  are  above 
10,000  souls  in  the  east  end  of  London  who  must  emigrate 

speedity  or  die Above  25,000  of  these  are  workmen 

more  or  less  skilled  in  engineer  and  shipbuilding  occupa 
tions.  These  are  not  shepherds,  nor  are  they  ploughmen, 
nor  will  they  ever  be  to  any  great  extent  one  or  the  other. 
They  are  mechanics,  and  will  be  so  go  where  the}^  may.  In 
the  vast  hives  of  industry  in  Lancashire  there  are  a  greater 

number  who  must  emigrate  or  die Not  one  is  either 

pastoral  or  agricultural,  and  few  are  likely  ever  to  be  either." 

Some  of  these,  he  tells,  are  able  to  get  olf  "  to  Massachu 
setts  to  find  full  occupation  in  cotton."  Charity  is  sending 
others,  and  the  Government  transporting  as  many  as  it  can 
to  its  North  American  provinces.  Can  we  not  prove  our 
cosmopolitanism,  and  our  desire  that  all  men  may  trade 
freely,  by  giving  150,000  skilled  workmen  of  London  and 
Lancashire  the  guarantee  of  steady  work  at  generous  wages, 
and  so  open  a  way  for  the  employment  of  those  who,  for  the 
want  of  passage  money,  must  otherwise  die,  as  Blackwood 
says,  "from  sheer  famine  in  the  heart  of  the  wealthiest  city 
of  the  world  ?  "  What  a  market  would  they  and  their  fami 
lies  create  for  farm  products  in  all  their  varieties,  and  how 
immensely  and  rapidly  would  the  application  of  their  skill 
and  industry  to  our  undeveloped  resources  increase  the  gen 
eral  wealth  of  the  country! 

Let  the  report  of  our  high  wages,  with  assurances  that  these 
shall  be  protected  by  law,  be  made  in  all  the  great  industrial 
centres  of  Great  Britain,  France,  Belgium,  and  Germany, 
as  the  freedom  of  our  public  lands  has  been  in  the  pastoral 
and  agricultural  districts,  and  our  farmers  will  not  long 
want  a  market.  But  this  involves  the  maintenance  of  a 
rigid  and  generous  system  of  Protection.  In  the  ad 
dresses  and  letters,  which  compose  this  volume,  the  reader 
will  find  little  else  than  the  application  of  the  principles 
here  enunciated  to  questions  of  policy  as  they  have  arisen 
since  the  suppression  of  the  rebellion. 

In  advocating  such  a  system  of  Protection  as  would  en 
able  our  miners  and  manufacturers  to  pay  wages  sufficiently 
liberal  to  induce  skilled  workmen  to  immigrate  and  enable 
them  to  become  liberal  consumers,  I  have  believed  that  I  was 
asserting  and  defending  the  right  of  the  American  farmer  to 
a  market — a  remunerative  market — for  his  crops.  Should 
this  volume  convince  any  number  of  my  countrymen  of  the 
correctness  of  these  views,  it  will  vindicate  the  judgment  of 
those  who  persuaded  me  to  prepare  it  for  publication,  and 
gratify  the  most  ardent  wish  of 

THE    AUTHOR. 

PHILADELPHIA, 

November  1st,  1811. 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

k 

INTRODUCTION v 

PROTECTION  TO  AMERICAN  LABOR. 

(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  January  31,  1866.) 

The  one  want  of  our  country — Why  the  South  demanded 
free  trade — Results  of  free  trade — Effect  of  free  trade  on  the 
poor  whites  of  the  South — How  England  established  her 
supremacy — England  preaches  but  does  not  practise  free 
trade — Free  trade  exhausts  land  and  impoverishes  farmers — 
Free  trade  keeps  us  in  subjection  to  England's  colonial  policy — 
France — England — Prussia — Shoddy — Secret  of  Bonaparte's 
power — What  protection  has  done  for  Germany — Washington, 
Jefferson  and  Jackson — Man  cannot  compromise  principles 
— Then  and  now — Virginia — Pennsylvania  challenges  gener 
ous  competition — A  suggestion  and  example  to  the  South 
— We  can  pay  our  debts  "  without  moneys  " — The  people  of 
the  prairies  need  a  protective  tariff — Domestic  commerce  is 
more  profitable  than  foreign — What  Congress  should  do — 
We  are  still  in  colonial  bondage  to  England — Protection 
cheapens  goods 9 

TRADE  WITH  BRITISH  AMERICA. 
(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  March  7,  1866.) 
The  Reciprocity  treaty — Coal — Difference  between  anthra 
cite  and  bituminous — The  former  should  be  free — Duty  on 
the  latter  not  a  tax  on  American  consumer,  but  is  paid  by 
the  exporter 85 

HOW  OUR  WAR  DEBT  CAN  BE  PAID. 

(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  January  3d,  1867.)    100 


CONTENTS. 

PAQK 

THE  SOUTH— ITS  RESOURCES  AND  WANTS. 

(Address  delivered  at  New  Orleans,  May  11,  1867,  as  reported  in  the 
New  Orleans  Republican.) 146 

(Address  at  Montgomery,  Alabama,  May  16,  1867,  as  reported  in  the 
Montgomery  Sentinel.) 159 

(Address  at  Philadelphia,  Pennsylvania.  Delivered  June  17,  1867, 
as  reported  for  the  Inquirer.) 171 

AMERICAN  INDUSTRY  AND  FINANCE. 

(Speech  delivered  at  the  Music  Hall,  Milwaukee,  Sep.  24,  1867.  Re 
ported  for  the  Daily  Sentinel,  and  revised  by  the  Author.) 185 

CONTRACTION,  THE   ROAD   TO   BANKRUPTCY, 
NOT  TO  RESUMPTION. 

(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  January  18, 1868.)    210 

INTERNAL  REVENUE. 

(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  June  1,  1868.) 

The  spirit  tax  a  special  burden  on  the  West — It  enhances 
the  cost  of  drugs  and  restricts  exports — The  South  com 
peting  with 'the  West,  and  increasing  the  necessity  for  di 
versified  industries 239 

REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  THE 
REVENUE. 

(Remarks  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  Feb.  4,  1869.) 

The  condition  of  the  working  classes  in  1857-8,  and  in 
1867-8  compared 253 

THE  EIGHT-HOUR  SYSTEM. 

Letter  to  the  operatives  in  the  work-shops  and  factories  of 
the  Fourth  Congressional  District  of  Pennsylvania,  May  19, 
1869 278 

MR.  WELLS'  REPORT. 

(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  January  11, 1870.) 

Cast  steel — English  schedule  of  an  American  tariff  on  steel 
endorsed  by  Mr.  Wells — Pig  Iron — Wages  paid  in  South 
Staffordshire,  England,  in  1866 — Coal  and  the  British  North 
American  Colonies — How  the  South  should  diversify  its  in 
dustry — What  Taxes  should  be  repealed 284 

PERSONAL  EXPLANATION. 

(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  January  20,  1870.)    320 


CONTENTS.  7 

PAOK 

FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  AND  LABORERS  NEED 
PROTECTION— CAPITAL  CAN  TAKE  CARE  OP 
ITSELF. 

(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  March  25,  1870.) 

Protection  cheapens  commodities — The  Internal  Revenue 
system — It  is  expensive  and  inquisitorial,  and  should  be 
abolished  at  the  earliest  possible  day — Free  trade  means 
low  wages  and  a  limited  market  for  grain — Wages  and 
subsistence  of  families  of  laborers  in  Europe — Cincinnati — 
Her  workshops  and  workmen — Protective  duties  not  a  tax 
— How  the  Internal  Revenue  can  be  dispensed  with — Effect 
of  protection  upon  prices  again — The  tariffs  of  England  and 
France  discriminate  against  American  farmers — England  a 
hideous  monopoly — Free  trade  supports  it — A  home  market 
— A  prediction  fulfilled — Protection  stimulates  immigration 
— Skilled  workmen  the  most  valuable  commodity  we  can  im 
port — French  free  trade — The  purpose  of  the  Free  List — 
Duties  on  wool  and  woolens — The  way  to  reduce  the  taxes — 
The  defects  of  the  present  tariff,  and  the  remedies  suggested 
by  the  new  bill — Duties  which  need  readjustment — The 
present  law  should  be  revised,  not  overthrown — The  care 
ful  consideration  bestowed  upon  the  bill  by  the  committee — 
How  it  will  stimluate  the  shipping  interest — Steel  ad  valorem 
— Stephen  Colwell — The  classification  of  iron  not  new — 
Proof  that  protection  cheapens  goods — Silk  poplins — Tin  and 
nickel— Effect  of  protecting  nickel 322 

THE     VALUE     OF     AN     INEXPORTABLE     CUR 
RENCY. 

(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  June  8,  1870.)    392 

JUDGE  KELLEY'S   ACCEPTANCE    OF    THE    NOMI 
NATION  FOR  CONGRESS,  July  2d,  1870 397 

LETTER  ON  THE  CHINESE  QUESTION,  Aug.  22d,  1870.  403 

CENTENNIAL    CELEBRATION    AND     INTERNA 
TIONAL  EXPOSITION. 

(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  January  10, 1871.) 

Philadelphia — Her  Park — Her  working  people — How  they 
live — What  they  produce — What  foreign  manufacturers  will 
learn  by  visiting  her 415 


3  CONTENTS. 

J»AG1 

DOMINICA. 

(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  January  27, 1871.) 

Effect  of  the  acquisition  upon  ship-building  and  our  ocean 
marine — Slavery  in  Cuba — Our  responsibility,  and  how  we 
may  avoid  it — Extent  to  which  we  support  Slavery  in  foreign 
countries — False  position  of  the  Democracy  on  this  subject..  427 

REVENUE  REFORM. 

(Speech  delivered  in  the  House  of  Representatives,  April  18,  1871.)    448 

THE  NEW  NORTHWEST. 

(An  address  on  the    North  Pacific  Railway,  in  its  relations  to  the 

development  of  the  Northwestern  section  of  the  United  States,  and  to 

I    the  Industrial  and  Commercial  Interests  of  the  nation.     Delivered  in  the 

Academy  of  Music,    Philadelphia,    June    32,  1871.      Reported   hy  D. 

Wolfe  Brown,  Phonographer.) 

Pacific  Railroad  History — The  Pennsylvania  Central  Road 
— A  quarter  of  a  century — The  Northern  Pacific  Railroad 
— Compared  with  other  routes — Growth  of  railroad  traffic — 
The  New  Northwest — Genial  climate — Wool  and  beetroot 
sugar — Montana — Lieut.  Doane's  report — Settlements  along 
the  line — Comercial  advantages — The  Northern  river  system 
— The  future  Pacific  Metropolis — Some  official  testimony — 
Grades — A  natural  pathway — Effect  on  American  commerce 
— Pacific  Coast  harbors — Puget  Sound — Productions — Re 
sources  and  seasons — The  work  of  development — Philadelphia 
interests 454 

INDEX - .  495 


;   ... 

(        -^•••.Vr 


SPEECHES  AND  LETTEKS 

ON 

INDUSTRIAL  AND  FINANCIAL  QUESTIONS. 

PROTECTION  TO  AMERICAN  LABOR. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
JANUARY  31sT,  1866. 

THE  House  being  in  the  Committee  of  the  Whole  on  the  state  of 
the  Union — 

Mr.  Kelley  said : 

Mr.  Chairman — The  eloquent  gentleman  from  Indi 
ana,  [Mr.  VOORHEES,]  whose  voice  during  the  war  was 
so  potent  in  the  councils  of  the  Democratic  party,  and 
who  has  borne  so  prominent  a  part  on  this  floor  in 
resisting  all  the  legislation  by  which  the  rebellion  was  to 
be,  and  has  been  crushed,  in  the  course  of  his  recent  de 
fense  of  the  President's  message  and  policy  lauded  him  as 
a  champion  of  free  trade.  He  said  the  President  had 
struck  "  a  manly  and  honest  blow "  at  the  protection 
afforded  by  the  tariff  to  the  varied  industries  of  the  coun 
try,  and  cited  this  brief  extract  from  his  message  in  proof 
of  his  assertion : 

"  Now,  in  their  turn,  the  property  and  income  of  the  country 
should  bear  their  just  proportion  of  the  burden  of  taxation,  while 
in  our  impost  system,  through  means  of  which  increased  vitality  is 
incidentally  imparted  to  all  the  industrial  interests  of  the  nation, 
1he  duties  should  be  so  adjusted  as  to  fall  most  heavily  on  articles 
of  luxury,  leaving  the  necessaries  of  life  as  free  from  taxation  as 
the  absolute  wants  of  the  Government,  economically  administered, 
will  justify." 

Entertaining,  sir,  the  views  I  do,  and  which  I  propose 
to  submit  to  the  committee,  I  had  found  in  that  portion 
of  the  President's  message  the  expression  of  a  desire  to 
foster  the  industry,  develop  the  resources,  and  increase  the 
wealth  and  power  of  the  country.  Till  the  gentleman 
called  my  attention  to  the  fact,  I  had  not  observed  that 

9 


10  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

Mr.  Johnson's  expression  was  enigmatical  and  susceptible 
of  at  least  a  double  construction.  I  will  not,  however, 
detain  the  committee  by  endeavoring  to  ascertain  the 
President's  meaning,  which  time  will  disclose ;  but  with 
out  abandoning  the  hope  that  my  apprehension  of  his 
words  is  correct,  will  proceed,  in  a  general  way,  to  demon 
strate  that  the  gentleman's  views  as  to  how  we  may  best 
equalize  and  increase  the  wealth  of  the  people  of  the 
United  States  are  erroneous.  In  the  course  of  his  remarks 
he  said : 

"  We  have  two  great  interests  in  this  country,  one  of  which  has 
prostrated  the  other.  The  past  four  years  of  suffering  arid  war  has 
been  the  opportune  harvest  of  the  manufacturer.  The  looms  and 
machine  shops  of  New  England  and  the  iron  furnaces  of  Pennsyl 
vania  have  been  more  prolific  of  wealth  to  their  owners  than  the 
most  dazzling  gold  mines  of  the  earth." 

Again : 

"  The  present  law  of  tariff  is  being  rapidly  understood.  It  is  no 
longer  a  deception,  but  rather  a  well-defined  and  clearly  recognized 
outrage.  The  agricultural  labor  of  the  land  is  driven  to  the  counters 
of  the  most  gigantic  monopoly  ever  before  sanctioned  by  law. 
From  its  exorbitant  demands  there  is  no  escape.  The  European 
manufacturer  is  forbidden  our  ports  of  trade  for  fear  he  might  sell 
his  goods  at  cheaper  rates  and  thus  relieve  the  burdens  of  the  con 
sumers.*  We  have  declared  by  law  that  there  is  but  one  market 
into  which  our  citizens  shall  go  to  make  their  purchases,  and  we 
have  left  it  to  the  owners  of  the  market  to  fix  their  own  prices. 
The  bare  statement  of  such  a  principle  foreshadows  at  once  the 
consequences  which  flow  from  it.  One  class  of  citizens,  and  by  far 
the  largest  and  most  useful,  is  placed  at  the  mercy,  for  the  necessa 
ries  as  well  as  luxuries  of  life,  of  the  fostered,  favored,  and  protected 
class  to  whose  aid  the  whole  power  of  the  Government  is  given." 

And  again : 

"  Free  trade  with  all  the  markets  of  the  world  is  the  true  theory 
of  government." 

Sir,  as  I  proceed,  it  will,  I  think,  appear  that  we  have 
more  than  "  two  great  interests,"  and  that  protection  such 
as  can  only  be  afforded  by  a  tariff  is  required  by  them  all  ; 

*  Experience  has  demonstrated  the  absurdity  of  this  theoretical  conclusion. 
The  tariff  of  1857  was  a  free  trade  tariff.  The  duties  it  fixed  were  lower  than 
had  prevailed  since  the  1st  of  July,  1812,  yet  the  importation  of  foreign  goods 
under  it  in  1858-59  and '60  averaged  but  $327,849,178.  The  tariff  which  Mr. 
Voorhees  denounced  was  confessedly  protective;  the  duties  it  levied  were  about 
treble  those  imposed  by  the  law  of  1857,  and  higher  than  had  ever  been  levied 
before,  yet  the  importation  of  foreign  goods  during  the  years  1866  67-68  and 
'69,  when  the  people  of  the  Southern  States  were  too  much  impoverished  by  the 
war  to  construct  railroads  or  indulge  in  foreign  luxuries,  averaged  $416,920,364. 
(See  the  official  table  appended  to  speech  of  March  25th,  1870.) 


PROTECTION  TO  AMERICAN   LABOR.  11 

that  they  are  interwoven  with  such  exquisite  harmony 
that  no  one  of  them  can  suffer  alone  ;  and  that  to  destroy 
any  one  is  to  impair  the  vital  power  of  all. 

Gruff  old  Samuel  Johnson  said  in  substance  that,  when 
he  contemplated  the  many  diseases  to  which  human  life  is 
a  prey  and  the  countless  means  for  its  destruction,  he  won 
dered  that  anybody  lived  to  maturity  ;  and  when,  on  the 
other  hand,  he  beheld  the  infinitude  of  specifics  offered  for 
every  form  of  disease,  he  was  led  to  wonder  that  people 
ever  died.  And  the  thought  recurs  to  me  as  I  contem 
plate  the  condition  of  our  country  from  either  of  two 
stand  points — that  of  the  despondent  patriot  and  him 
who  conceals  his  determined  treason  under  expressions  of 
acquiescent  loyalty,  or  that  of  the  cheerful  patriot  who 
knows  something  of  our  unmeasured  resources.  Regard 
ing  our  debt,  which  set  forth  in  figures  seems  so  crushing, 
and  our  pension  lists,  which,  embracing  more  names  than 
did  the  muster  rolls  of  the  contending  armies  at  Waterloo, 
announce  the  fearful  amount  of  infirmity,  widowhood,  and 
orphanage  for  which  we  are  bound  to  provide  ;  remember 
ing  how  the  ruling  powers  of  other  nations  hate  us  ;  look 
ing  at  the  immense  extent  and  resources  of  the  British 
dominions  on  our  north,  and  considering  how  sedulously 
the  imperial  Government  has  pursued  the  design  of  uniting 
those  dominions  and  constructing  such  governmental  works 
as  would  "  render  Canada  accessible  to  her  Majesty's  forces 
at  all  seasons  of  the  year,  as  well  upon  grounds  peculiar 
to  Canada  as  from  considerations  affecting  the  interests  of 
the  other  colonies  and  of  the  whole  empire ;"  remember 
ing,  again,  the  Monroe  doctrine,  and  the  fact  that  he  who 
occupies  the  throne  of  Mexico  is,  though  an  Austrian,  the 
creature  of  the  ambitious  man  whose  will  is  law  to 
France ;  and,  in  view  of  these  facts,  considering  the  inter 
nal  condition  of  our  country,  with  nearly  a  million  square 
miles  of  our  territory  desolated  by  four  years  of  stubborn 
war,  and  with  its  people  divided  into  three  classes,  dis 
trusting  and  hating  each  other — four  millions  of  them 
born  as  things  for  a  market  and  strangers  to  the  enjoy 
ment  of  any  human  right ;  six  or  eight  millions  more  poor 
and  ignorant  nearly  as  they,  and  unused  and  averse  to 
labor,  less  hopeful,  and  tending  each  year  more  nearly  to 
dependence  on  the  rifle,  the  net,  and  the  line ;  and  the 
remaining  class,  less  numerous  than  either  of  the  others, 
but  possessing  all  the  wealth  and  culture,  acknowledging 


12  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN    LABOR. 

themselves  a  conquered  people,  but  with  rare  exceptions 
proving  by  all  their  acts  that  they  are  unconverted,  and 
that  they  hate  the  Union,  its  Constitution,  and  the  people 
who  maintained  the  unity  of  the  one  and  the  sovereignty 
of  the  other  as  intensely  as  they  did  when  they  began  the 
unholiest  war  of  history  ;  regarding,  I  say  these  facts,  the 
disguised  traitor  may  still  hope  for  the  accomplishment  of 
lis  purpose,  and  the  despondent  patriot  may  well  despair. 

On  the  other  hand,  he  who  contemplates  our  geographi 
cal  position,  which  makes  us,  on  the  one  ocean,  business 
neighbors  to  seven  hundred  and  fifty  millions  of  the  peo 
ple  of  Asia,  and  on  the  other  to  two  hundred  and  fifty 
millions  of  the  busy  people  of  Europe,  our  vast  agricul 
tural  resources,  our  unestimated  mineral  wealth,  the  mag 
nitude  of  our  rivers,  and  the  natural  wealth  of  the  coun 
try  they  drain,  the  capacity  of  our  people  for  enterprise, 
their  ingenuity,  and  persistence,  and  who  withal  com 
prehends  the  laws  of  political  economy  and  social  science, 
and  believes  that  a  free  and  educated  people  will  give 
practical  effect  to  great  truths,  smiles  with  derision  upon 
him  who  sees  danger  to  our  country  in  the  complicated 
facts  suggested. 

I  have  before  me,  sir,  the  yellowed  pages  of  a  pam 
phlet,  printed  in  London  in  1677,  which  contains  a  panacea 
for  all  our  ills,  the  suggestions  of  which,  illustrated  by  the 
experience  of  our  own  and  other  nations,  will,  if  applied 
to  our  resources,  bring  permanent  peace  and  prosperity  to 
our  country,  elevate  the  freedman  into  the  prosperous  and 
intelligent  citizen,  bless  the  master  spirits  of  the  South 
with  wealth  beyond  their  past  imaginings,  and  give  them, 
as  steady  competitors  in  the  race  of  life,  "  the  mean 
whites,"  as  they  designate  their  poor  neighbors  ;  will  re 
construct  their  broken  railroads  and  canals,  rebuild  their 
ruined  cities,  towns,  and  villages,  and  make  their  barren 
and  wasted  fields  bloom  and  blossom  as  those  of  the  fair 
est  portions  of  the  North,  of  Belgium,  Germany,  France,  or 
England. 

This  quaint  old  pamphlet  was  written  by  "Andrew 
Yarrinton,  Gentleman,"  and  is  entitled,  "England's  Im 
provement  by  Sea  and  Land.  How  to  outdo  the  Dutch 
without  Fighting,  to  pay  Debts  without  Moneys,  to  set  at 
Work  all  the  Poor  of  England  with  the  Growth  of  our 
own  Lands."  It  disposes  very  effectually  of  the  gentle 
man's  proposition  that  free  trade  "is  the  true  theory  of 
government." 


PROTECTION'  TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  13 

When  Andrew  Yarrinton  wrote,  the  Dutch  were  dis 
puting  the  supremacy  of  the  seas  with  England,  and  she 
was  exporting  raw  materials  and  buying  manufactured 
articles;  and  one  object  of  his  pamphlet  was  to  relieve 
the  English  people  from  the  taunt  of  the  Dutch  that 
they  "sold  their  whole  skins  for  a  sixpence,  and  bought 
back  the  tails  for  a  shilling  " — a  commercial  policy  which 
the  American  people,  with  rare  and  brief  exceptions,  have 
steadily  pursued.  To  Yarrinton  and  Sir  George  Down 
ing,  author  of  the  Navigation  Act,  an  American  by  birth, 
and  a  member  of  the  first  graduating  class  of  Harvard 
college,  England,  in  my  judgment,  owes  more  of  her 
wealth  and  power  than  to  any  other  two  men,  however 
illustrious  their  names  may  be  in  her  history.  Before 
they  influenced  her  counsels  Holland  was  mistress  of  the 
sea.  But  the  Navigation  Act  and  the  employment  of  her 
people  on  the  growth  of  her  lands,  transferred  the  scep 
ter  to  England.  The  purpose  of  Downing's  bill  as  de 
clared  in  its  preamble,  was  "  to  keep  his  Majesty's  subjects 
in  the  plantations  in  a  firmer  dependence,"  to  "increase 
English  shipping,"  and  to  insure  "the  vent  of  English 
woolens  and  other  manufactures  and  commodities."  What 
Yarrinton  and  Downing  taught  their  country  we  can  prac 
tice  for  the  benefit  of  ours.  And  as  England  outdid  the 
Dutch  without  fighting,  so  can  we  outdo  her  by  the  arts 
of  peace,  and  enforce  the  Monroe  doctrine  against  the 
world  without  firing  a  gun  ;  and,  vast  as  is  our  indebted 
ness,  strangers  will  come  and  cast  their  lot  with  us  and 
liquidate  it  if  we  so  legislate  as  "  to  set  at  work  all  the 
poor  of  "  the  United  States  "  with  the  growth  of  our  own 
lands."  They  will  bring  with  them  arts  and  industries, 
and  implements  with  which  we  are  not  familiar  ;  will  open 
new  quarries,  mines,  and  ore  banks ;  will  build  new  fur 
naces,  forges,  mills,  and  workshops ;  will  revive  wasted 
lands  and  open  new  fields,  and  by  creating  a  home  mar 
ket  will  enable  the  farmer  to  practice  skillful  and  remuner 
ative  husbandry,  and  will  create  American  commerce  by 
enabling  our  merchants  to  supply  ships  with  assorted  car 
goes  of  American  goods. 

THE    ONE   WANT   OF   OUR   COUNTRY. 

Sir,  the  pressing  want  of  our  country  is  men.  We  need 
not  sigh  for  additional  territory.  We  need  go  to  no 
foreign  nation  for  any  product  of  agriculture.  Abundant 


14  PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR. 

as  are  our  ascertained  stores  of  gold,  silver,  coal,  iron, 
copper,  zinc,  lead,  cinnabar,  kaolin,  petroleum,  and  the 
infinite  number  of  substances  man  has  utilized,  the  extent 
of  our  mineral  wealth  is  unmeasured  and  unimagined. 
And  our  ocean-bound  coasts,  the  immense  inland  seas  that 
bound  us  on  the  north,  the  land-locked  Gulf  that  laves  our 
southern  shores,  and  our  grand  rivers,  impel  us  to  com 
mercial  enterprise,  and  proclaim  the  one  great  want  of  our 
country  to  be  men.  Labor  alone  can  make  these  un 
paralleled  resources  available;  and  when  by  securing  to 
industry  its  just  reward  we  shall  develop  and  attract  hither 
from  other  lands  a  supply  of  labor  that  will  make  the 
march  of  our  conquest  over  the  elements  of  our  wealth 
steadily  progressive,  our  debt,  though  expressed  by  the 
numerals  required  to  tell  it  now,  will  shrink  into  compar 
ative  insignificance,  and  the  Powers  which  by  treachery 
and  disregard  of  international  law  during  the  last  four 
years  would  have  destroyed  us,  will  assume  relatively 
Lilliputian  proportions. 

These  are  not  new  thoughts.  So  long  ago  as  1689, 
Locke,  in  his  Essay  on  Civil  Government,  said : 

"  Let  any  one  consider  what  the  difference  is  between  an  acre  of 
land  planted  with  tobacco  or  sugar,  sown  with  wheat  or  barley,  and 
an  acre  of  the  same  land  lying  in  common,  without  any  husbandry 
upon  it;  and  he  will  find  the  improvement  of  labor  makes  the  far 
greater  part  of  the  value.  I  think  it  will  be  but  a  very  modest  com 
putation  to  say  that  of  the  products  of  the  earth  useful  to  the  life 
of  a  man,  nine  tenths  are  the  effects  of  labor.  Nay,  if  we  will  rightly 
consider  things  as  they  come  to  our  use,  and  cast  up  the  several 
expenses  about  them — what  in  them  is  purely  owing  to  nature,  and 
what  to  labor — we  shall  find  that  in  most  of  them  ninety-nine  hun- 
dredths  are  wholly  to  be  put  on  the  account  of  labor.  There  cannot 
be  a  clearer  demonstration  of  anything  than  several  nations  of  the 
Americans  are  of  this,  who  are  rich  in  land  and  poor  in  all  the  com 
forts  of  life ;  whom  nature  having  furnished  as  rich  as  any  other 
people  with  the  materials  of  plenty,  that  is  a  fruitful  soil,  apt  to 
produce  in  abundance  what  might  serve  for  food,  raiment,  and 
delight,  yet  for  want  of  improving  it  by  labor  have  not  one  hundreth 
part  of  the  conveniences  we  enjoy." 

But  to  make  labor  fully  available  it  must  be  steadily 
employed  and  generously  rewarded,  and  to  secure  these 
results  the  employments  of  a  country  must  be  largely 
diversified.  A  nation  whose  territory  is  broad  and  remote 
from  dense  populations  cannot,  by  pursuing  commerce  and 
agriculture  alone,  prosper  or  endure.  This  is  the  decree 
of  nature.  Land,  as  well  as  man,  requires  rest  and  food ; 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  15 

and  a  purely  agricultural  and  commercial  nation  can  afford 
neither  of  these.  The  social  history  of  the  world  verifies 
this  proposition.  To  make  a  nation  prosperous  remuner 
ative  employment  must  be  accessible  to  all  its  people ;  and 
to  that  end  industry  must  be  so  diversified  that  he  who 
has  not  the  strength  for  agricultural  or  other  labor  requir 
ing  muscle  may  make  his  feeble  sinews  available  in  some 
gentler  employment.  Agriculture  and  commerce  afford 
lew  stimulants  to  inventive  genius;  diversified  industry 
offers  many.  Childhood  in  a  purely  agricultural  com 
munity  is  wasted  in  idleness,  as  are  the  winter  months  of 
robust  men,  and  to  realize  the  truth  of  the  rnaxim  that 
time  is  money,  the  varied  industry  of  a  country  should 
offer  employment  to  all  for  all  seasons  of  the  year,  that 
each  day  may  be  made  to  earn  its  own  subsistence.  And 
herein  is  illustrated  the  harmony  of  interests,  for  where 
diversity  of  employment  is  successfully  promoted,  agricul 
ture  finds  its  readiest  markets  and  earns  its  richest  rewards: 
for  within  accessible  distance  from  the  city  or  town  the 
farmer  has  a  market  for  those  perishable  productions  which 
will  not  bear  extended  transportation,  but  the  cultivation 
of  which,  in  alternation  with  white  or  hard  crops, 
strengthens  and  enriches  his  land.  But  of  this  hereafter. 

WHY   THE    SOUTH    DEMANDED   FREE   TRADE. 

Unhappily,  sir,  it  has  not  been  the  policy  of  those  who 
have  governed  our  country  to  permit,  much  less  to  en 
courage,  such  needed  diversification  of  employment  and 
productions.  I  have  before  me  an  imperial  octavo  volume 
embracing  more  than  nine  hundred  pages,  and  illustrated 
with  the  likenesses  of  many  distinguished  southern  states 
men  and  teachers.  It  is  entitled  "Cotton  is  King,  and 
Pro-Slavery  Arguments,  comprising  the  Writings  of  Ham 
mond,  Harper,  Christie,  Stringfellow,  Hodge,  Bledsoe,  and 
Cartwright  on  this  Important  Subject,  by  E.  N.  Elliott, 
LL.  D.,  President  of  Planters'  College,  Mississippi,  with 
an  Essay  on  Slavery  in  the  Light  of  International  Law,  by 
the  Editor."  This  volume,  so  valuable  to  the  future  his 
torian,  bears  the  imprint  of  Prichard,  Abbott  &  Loomis, 
Augusta.  Georgia,  1860.  And  the  title  page  announces 
that  it  was  "  published  and  sold  exclusively  by  subscrip 
tion."  When,  this  work  was  published,  the  establishment 
of  the  southern  confederacy  was,  doubtless,  a  foregone 
conclusion  in  the  minds  of  its  publishers  and  their  patrons; 


16  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

there  was,  therefore,  no  further  reason  for  the  southern 
leaders  disguising  the  purposes  they  had  had  in  view  while, 
in  the  name  of  the  Democratic  party,  governing  our  coun 
try.  I  refer  to  it  in  order  that  these  distinguished  writers 
may,  for  themselves,  declare  the  aims  and  motives  that 
governed  them.  The  objects  they  proposed  to  attain  are 
thus  expressed  under  the  head  of  "  Economical  Relations 
of  Slavery:" 

"  The  opposition  to  the  protective  tariff  by  the  South  arose  from 
two  causes;  the  first  openly  avowed  at  the  time,  and  the  second 
clearly  deducible  from  the  policy  it  pursued ;  the  one  to  secure  the 
foreign  market  for  its  cotton,  the  other  to  obtain  a  bountiful  supply 
of  provisions  at  cheap  rates."  "  But  they  could  not 

monopolize  the  market  unless  they  could  obtain  a  cheap  supply  of 
food  and  clothing  for  their  negroes,  and  raise  their  cotton  at  such 
reduced  prices  as  to  undersell  their  rivals.  A  manufacturing  popu 
lation,  with  its  mechanical  coadjutors  in  the  midst  of  the  provision 
growers,  on  a  scale  such  as  the  protective  policy  contemplated,  it  was 
conceived  would  create  a  permanent  market  for  their  products  and 
enhance  the  price  ;  whereas  if  this  manufacturing  could  be  prevented, 
and  a  system  of  free  trade  be  adopted,  the  South  would  constitute  the 
principal  provision  market  of  the  country,  and  the  fertile  lands  of  the 
North  supply  the  cheap  food  demanded  for  its  slaves. 

Again : 

"  By  the  protective  policy,  the  planters  expected  to  have  the  cost 
of  both  provisions  and  clothing  increased,  and  their  ability  to 
monopolize  the  foreign  markets  diminished  in  a  corresponding  degree. 
If  they  could  establish  free  trade,  it  would  insure  the  American  mar 
ket  to  foreign  manufacturers,  secure  the  foreign  markets  for  their 
leading  staples,  repress  home  manufactures,  force  a  large  number  of 
northern  men  into  agriculture,  multiply  the  growth  and  diminish 
the  price  of  provisions,  feed  and  clothe  their  slaves  at  lower  rates, 
produce  their  cotton  for  a  third  or  fourth  of  former  prices,  rival  all 
other  countries  in  its  cultivation,  monopolize  the  trade  in  the  article 
throughout  the  whole  of  Europe,  and  build  up  a  commerce  that 
would  make  us  the  ruler  of  the  seas." 


"  The  markets  in  the  Southwest,  now  so  important,  were  then 
quite  limited.  As  the  protective  system,  coupled  with  the  contem 
plated  internal  improvements,  if  successfully  accomplished,  would 
inevitably  tend  to  enhance  the  price  of  agricultural  products,  while 
the  free-trade,  anti-internal-improvement  policy  would  as  certainly 
reduce  their  value,  the  two  systems  were  long  considered  so  antago 
nistic  that  the  success  of  the  one  must  sound  the  Imell  of  the  other. 
Indeed,  so  fully  was  Ohio  impressed  with  the  necessity  of  promoting 
manufactures  that  all  capital  thus  employed  was  for  many  years 
entirely  exempt  from  taxation. 

"  It  was  in  vain  that  the  friends  of  protection  appealed  to  the  fact 
that  the  duties  levied  on  foreign  goods  did  not  necessarily  enhance 
the  cost  to  the  consumer;  that  the  competition  among  the  home  manu- 


PROTECTION   TO  AMERICAN  LABOR.  17 

facturers  and  between  them  and  foreigners  had  greatly  reduced  the 
price  of  nearly  every  article  properly  protected  ;  that  foreign  manu 
facturers  always  had,  and  always  would,  advance  their  prices 
ac^jrding  to  our  dependence  upon  them ;  that  domestic  competition 
was  the  only  safety  the  country  had  against  foreign  imposition  ;  that 
it  was  necessary  we  should  become  our  own  manufacturers  in  a  fair 
degree  to  render  ourselves  independent  of  other  nations  in  time  of  war 
as  well  as  to  guard  against  the  vacillations  in  foreign  legislation  ;  that 
the  South  would  be  vastly  the  gainer  by  having  the  market  for  its  pro 
ducts  at  its  own  doors  and  avoiding  the  cost  of  their  transit  across  the 
Atlantic  ;  that,  in  the  event  of  the  repression,  or  want  of  proper  expan 
sion,  of  our  manufactures  by  the  adoption  of  the  free-trade  system,  the 
imports  of  foreign  goods  to  meet  the  public  wants  would  soon  exceed 
the  ability  of  the  people  to  pay,  and  inevitably  involve  the  country  in 
bankruptcy.  Southern  politicians  remained  inflexible  arid  refused  to 
accept  any  policy  except  free  trade  and  the  utter  abandonment  of 
the  principle  of  protection.  Whether  they  were  jealous  of  the 
greater  prosperity  of  the  North  and  desirous  to  cripple  its  energies, 
or  whether  they  were  truly  fearful  of  bankrupting  the  South,  we 
shall  not  wait  to  inquire." 

The  author  doubtless  felt  that  it  would  be  sacrilegious 
to  inquire  too  curiously  into  the  motives  of  the  ministers 
of  a  monarch  so  absolute  as  King  Cotton,  but  we,  who  do 
not  live  in  the  fear  of  his  majesty,  may  freely,  and  not 
without  advantage,  consider  the  questions  propounded. 

And  again,  in  connection  with  the  assertion  that  with 
slave  labor  they  could  not  become  manufacturers,  and 
must  therefore  remain  at  the  mercy  of  the  North,  both  as 
to  food  and  clothing,  unless  the  European  markets  should 
be  retained,  the  writer  says  southern  statesmen  saw  that — 

"  Combinations  of  capitalists,  whether  engaged  in  manufacturing 
wool,  cotton,  or  iron,  would  draw  off  labor  from  the  cultivation  of  the 
soil,  and  cause  large  bodies  of  the  producers  to  become  consumers, 
and  that  roads  and  canals,  connecting  the  West  with  the  East,  were 
effectual  means  of  bringing  the  agricultural  and  manufacturing 
classes  into  closer  proximity,  to  the  serious  injury  of  the  planters." 

These  honest  and  fearless  exponents  of  the  free  trade 
of  which  the  gentleman  from  Indiana  says  the  President 
is  an  advocate,  seem  to  have  considered  the  chief  end  of 
man,  that  is,  of  all  American  men,  save  slave-holding 
planters,  to  be  to  produce  cheap  food  for  slaves ;  and  in 
this  book,  so  remarkable  for  its  frankness,  we  find  a  quo 
tation  from  a  speech  made  by  one  of  them,  which  runs  as 
follows : 

"  We  must  prevent  the  increase  of  manufactories,  force  the  surplus 

labor  into  agriculture,  promote  the  cultivation  of  our  unimproved 

western  lands,  until  provisions  are  so   multiplied  and   reduced  in 

price  that  the  slave  can  be  fed  so  cheaply  as  to  enable  us  to  grew  our 

2 


18  PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR. 

sugar  at  three  cents  a  pound.  Then,  without  protective  duties,  we 
can  rival  Cuba  in  the  production  of  that  staple  and  drive  her  from 
our  markets." 

RESULTS    OF    FREE   TRADE. 

By  the  persistent  and  domineering  pursuit  of  these  ends 
by  the  South,  and  the  unhallowed  spirit  of  compromise 
which  always  controlled  the  North,  the  manufactures  of 
the  country  were  destroyed;  and  the  West  (for  great  rail 
way  thoroughfares  had  not  then  been  constructed)  having 
been  reduced  to  dependence  on  the  South  for  her  market, 
consented  to  her  own  ruin.  It  may  be  that  having  deprived 
herself  of  any  other  market,  her  poverty  and  not  her  will 
consented ;  but  the  story  of  her  seduction  and  ruin  is  thus 
happily  told  in  "  Cotton  is  King : " 

"  The  West  which  had  long  looked  to  the  East  for  a  market  had 
its  attention  now  turned  to  the  South,  the  most  certain  and  conven 
ient  market  for  the  sale  of  its  products ;  the  planters  affording  to  the 
farmers  the  market  they  had  in  vain  sought  from  the  manufacturers. 
Jn  the  meantime  steamboat  navigation  was  acquiring  perfection  on 
the  western  rivers,  the  great  natural  outlets  for  western  produce, 
and  became  a  means  of  communication  between  the  Northwest  and 
the  Southwest,  as  well  as  with  the  trade  and  commerce  of  the  At 
lantic  cities.  This  gave  an  impulse  to  industry  and  enterprise  west 
of  the  Alleghanies  unparalleled  in  the  history  of  the  country.  While 
then  the  bounds  of  slave  labor  were  extending  from  Virginia,  the 
Carolinas,  arid  Georgia,  westward  over  Tennessee,  Alabama,  Missis 
sippi,  and  Arkansas,  the  area  of  free  labor  was  enlarging  with  equal 
rapidity  in  the  Northwest,  Ohio,  Indiana,  Illinois,  and  Michigan. 
Thus  within  these  provision  and  cotton  regions  were  the  forests 
cleared  away  or  the  prairies  broken  up  simultaneously  by  those  two 
antagonistic  forces.  Opponents  no  longer,  they  were  harmonized 
by  the  fusion  of  their  interests,  the  connecting  link  between  them 
being  the  steamboat.  Thus  also  was  a  tripartite  alliance  formed, 
by  which  the  western  farmer,  the  southern  planter,  and  the  English 
manufacturer  became,  united  in  a  common  bond  of  interest,  the  whole 
giving  their  support  to  the  doctrine  of  free  trade." 

With  this  unnatural  alliance  the  work  seemed  to  be 
completed,  and  in  verification  of  the  theories  of  the  north 
ern  leaders  of  the  Democratic  party  who,  like  the  gentle 
man  from  Indiana,  took  their  opinions  from  the  southern 
planters,  the  commerce  of  our  country  should  have  rapidly 
expanded,  and  Great  Britain  furnished  a  market  for  all 
our  surplus  grain.  But  what  were  the  results?  The 
laboring  people  of  the  manufacturing  States  were  soon 
without  employment  and  living  upon  past  earnings.  The 
deposit  lines  in  our  savings  banks  ran  down ;  the  banks 
of  discount  and  deposit  lost  their  specie ;  merchants  made 


PROTECTION    TO    AMERICAN    LABOR.  19 

* 

small  sales,  or  sold  on  long  and  uncertain  credits ;  and 
sagacious  men  saw  that  bankruptcy  impended  over  all. 
The  ruined  people  of  the  North  and  East  were  unable  to 
pay  for  the  products  of  the  South  or  West.  Large 
numbers  of  them,  abandoning  the  callings  to  which  they 
had  been  trained,  and  in  the  pursuit  of  which  while  pro 
viding  amply  for  the  support  of  their  families  they  could 
have  accumulated  capital  and  added  to  the  national  wealth 
and  power,  became  unskilful  farmers  on  mortgaged  land 
in  the  distant  West.  England,  no  longer  simply  mistress 
of  the  sea,  but  the  commercial  mistress  of  the  world,  seek 
ing  customers  who  could  pay  for  what  they  purchased, 
bought  her  grain  from  the  Baltic,  from  Egypt,  or  wherever 
she  could  buy  it  cheapest  or  with  greatest  convenience ; 
and  the  western  farmer,  having  supplied  the  coarse  pro 
visions  that  were  required  as  cheap  food  for  the  slaves, 
and  their  two  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  masters,  saw 
his  wheat  rot  in  the  field,  and  consumed  his  corn  as  fuel. 

But  what  was  the  effect  of  this  free-trade  alliance  upon 
the  interests  of  the  planters  ?  Did  it  enlarge  their  mar 
kets,  increase  the  price  of  their  staple,  and  by  a  golden 
harvest  to  them,  seem  to  compensate  for  the  universal  ruin 
in  which  it  had  involved  the  people  of  the  North  ?  We 
shall  see.  Had  cotton  manufactures  in  this  country  been 
fostered,  the  manufacturers  of  England  and  America  would 
have  been  competitors  in  the  cotton  market,  and,  as  corn- 
petition  among  buyers  ever  does,  would  have  maintained 
the  price  of  that  commodity.  But  the  mad  pursuit  of 
cheap  food  for  slaves  had  destroyed  competition  for  the 
planters'  product.  Their  policy  had  given  England  a 
monopoly  of  the  market  for  cotton.  They  had  made  En 
gland,  to  whose  ports  the  fabricants  of  Europe  went  for 
their  supply,  their  only  customer;  and  she,  having  ac 
cumulated  capital  which  yielded  but  small  interest,  while 
they  were  needy  debtors  compelled  to  borrow,  found  her 
self  in  a  condition  to  control  the  price  of  their  commodity. 
Perceiving  the  vast  relative  importance  of  a  continued 
supply  of  cheap  cotton  to  an  immediate  return  of  interest 
on  the  capital  involved  in  one  year's  supply,  the  English 
merchants  accumulated  cotton  to  an  extent  that  enabled 
them  to  decline  further  immediate  purchases  from  those 
who  were  always  in  debt  to  their  factors,  and  whose 
necessities  in  the  absence  of  any  other  market  would  soon 
compel  them  to  sell  at  any  price.  And  the  author  from 


20  PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN    LABOB. 

whom  I  have  quoted  so  extensively  gives  us,  on  page  72  of 
the  volume,  the  legitimate  result  of  the  folly  of  the  chief 
American  party  to  the  tripartite  alliance  in  favor  of  free 
trade,  when  he  says : 

"  Cotton,  up  to  the  date  when  this  controversy  had  been  fairly 
commenced,  had  been  worth,  in  the  English  market,  an  average 
price  of  from  29  7-10  to  48  4-10  cents  per  pound ;  but  at  this  period 
a  wide-spread  and  ruinous  depression  occured,  cotton  in  1826  having 
fallen  in  England  as  low  as  11  9-10  to  18  9-10  cents  per  pound." 

Thus  had  free  trade,  the  reign  of  which  the  Democratic 
party  is  endeavoring  to  restore,  accomplished  its  mission 
in  the  United  States.  Commerce,  manufactures,  and  agri 
culture,  involving  the  merchant,  artisan,  farmer,  and 
planter,  were  all  prostrate  and  at  the  mercy  of  the  capital 
ists  of  Great  Britain,  whose  selfishness  is  only  equaled  by 
that  of  the  class  whose  arrogance  and  unreasoning  will  had 
thus  subjected  the  entire  people  of  our  country  to  their 
control. 

EFFECT   OF   FREE    TRADE   ON    THE    POOR  WHITES   OF 
THE    SOUTH. 

Mr.  Chairman,  having  ascertained  the  result  of  the 
planters'  free-trade  policy  upon  their  own  interests  and 
those  of  the  people  of  the  North,  let  us  contemplate  the 
condition  of  the  masses  of  the  people  of  the  cotton  States. 
I  will  not  detain  you  by  any  reference  to  that  of  the  slaves 
and  free  people  of  color.  Other  occasions  will  be  more 
fitting  for  that.  But  on  nearly  one  million  of  square  miles 
of  territory  which  the  planters  regarded  as  their  exclusive 
domain,  were  some  six  or  eight  million  people  designated 
as  "  poor  "  or  "  mean  whites,"  to  whom  were  accorded  all 
the  rights  of  citizenship,  and  I  will  inquire  whether  their 
interests  had  been  promoted  by  this  policy  ?  Let  us,  in 
contemplating  their  condition  for  a  few  moments,  do  it, 
not  from  our  stand-point,  but  through  the  eyes  of  southern 
men. 

Mr.  Tarver,  of  Missouri,  in  the  course  of  a  paper  on 
Domestic  Manufactures  in  the  South  and  West,  published 
in  1847,  says : 

"The  free  population  of  the  South  maybe  divided  into  two  classes 
— the  slaveholder  and  the  non-slaveholder.  I  am  not  aware  that  the 
relative  numbers  of  these  two  classes  have  ever  been  ascertained  in 
any  of  the  States,  but  I  am  satisfied  that  the  non-slaveholders  far 
outnumber  the  slaveholders — perhaps  by  three  to  one.  In  the  more 
southern  portion  of  this  region,  the  non-slaveholders  possess,  gene- 


PROTECTION  TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  21 

rally,  but  very  small  means,  and  the  land  which  they  possess  is 
almost  universally  poor,  and  so  sterile  that  a  scanty  subsistence  ie 
all  that  can  be  derived  from  its  cultivation ;  and  the  more  fertile 
soil,  being  in  the  possession  of  the  slaveholder,  must  ever  remain  out 
of  the  power  of  those  who  have  none. 

"This  state  of  things  is  a  great  drawback,  and  bears  heavily  upon 

and  depresses  the  moral  energies  of  the  poorer  classes 

The  acquisition  of  a  respectable  position  in  the  scale  of  wealth 
appears  so  difficult,  that  they  decline  the  hopeless  pursuit,  and 
many  of  them  settle  down  into  habits  of  idleness,  and  become  the 
almost  passive  subjects  of  all  its  consequences.  And  I  lament  to 
say  that  I  have  observed  of  late  years  that  an  evident  deterioration 
is  taking  place  in  this  part  of  the  population,  the  younger  portion 
of  it  being  less  educated,  less  industrious,  and  in  every  point  of  view 
less  respectable,  than  their  ancestors." 

Governor  Hammond,  addressing  the  South  Carolina 
Institute  in  1850,  spoke  of  this  portion  of  the  people 
of  the  South  when  he  said : 

"  They  obtain  a  precarious  subsistence  by  occasional  jobs,  by  hunt 
ing,  by  fishing,  by  plundering  fields  or  folds,  and  too  often  by  what  is 
in  its  effects  far  worse — trading  with  slaves,  and  seducing  them  to 
plunder  for  their  benefit." 

William  Gregg,  Esq.,  addressing  the  same  Institute  in 
1851,  said : 

"From  the  best  estimate  that  I  have  been  able  to  make,  I  put 
down  the  white  people,  who  ought  to  work,  and  who  do  not,  or  who 
are  so  employed  as  to  be  wholly  unproductive  to  the  State,  at  one 

hundred  and  twenty-five  thousand By  this  it  appears 

that  but  one-fifth  of  the  present  poor  whites  of  our  State  would  be 

necessary  to  operate  one  million  spindles I  have  long 

been  under  the  impression,  and  every  day's  experience  has  strength 
ened  my  convictions,  that  the  evils  exist  in  the  wholly  neglected 
condition  of  this  class  of  persons.  Any  man  who  is  an  observer  of 
things  could  hardly  pass  through  our  country  without  being  struck 
with  the  fact  that  all  the  capital,  enterprise,  and  intelligence  is  em 
ployed  in  directing  slave  labor ;  and  the  consequence  is  that  a  large 
portion  of  our  poor  white  people  are  wholly  neglected,  and  are  suffered 
to  while  away  their  existence  in  a  state  but  one  step  in  advance  of  the 
Indian  of  the  forest." 

Hon.  J.  H.  Lumpkin,  of  Georgia,  in  a  paper  on  the  In 
dustrial  Kegeneration  of  the  South,  published  in  1852,  in 
advocacy  of  the  establishment  of  manufactures  which  had 
been  attempted  in  Georgia,  but  which  had  been  resisted  on 
the  ground  that  they  would  become  hot- beds  of  crime  and 
endanger  the  safety  of  slavery,  said  : 

"  It  is  objected  that  these  manufacturing  establishments  will  be 
come  the  hot-beds  of  crime But  I  am  by  no  means 

ready  to  concede  that  our  poor,  degraded,  half-fed,  half-clothed,  and 


22  PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR. 

ignorant  population — without  Sabbath  schools  or  any  other  kind  of 
instruction,  mental  or  moral,  or  without  any  just  appreciation  of 
character — will  be  injured  by  giving  them  employment  which  will 
bring  them  under  the  oversight  of  employers  who  will  inspire  them 
with  self-respect  by  taking  an  interest  in  their  welfare." 

Down  to  that  time  free  trade  had  certainly  done  but 
little  to  bless  the  poor  white  people  of  the  South.  Nor 
does  it  seem  from  recent  descriptions,  and  from  our  obser 
vation  of  them  in  military  prisons  and  hospitals,  to  have 
materially  benefited  them  down  to  the  present  day.  J.  R. 
Gilmore,  Esq.,  "Edmund  Kirke,"  in  his  discourse  on  the 
social  and  political  characteristics  of.  the  southern  whites, 
before  the  Jersey  City  Literary  Association,  estimated  the 
number  known  as  the  "mean  whites"  at  over  four  mil 
lions,  and  described  them  as  "  herding  together  in  sparse 
communities  and  gleaning  a  sorry  subsistence  from  hunt 
ing,  fishing,  and  poaching,  in  the  mountain  districts  of 
Virginia,  upper  Georgia,  Alabama,  Mississippi,  and  in  the 
sand  hills  of  North  Carolina  and  the  barrens  of  Tennessee, 
and  throughout  the  rest  of  the  South ;  as  hovering  around 
the  borders  of  large  plantations,  quartering  themselves 
upon  the  '  chivalry,'  stealing  the  deer  from  their  forests 
and  the  hams  from  their  smoke-houses."  He  said  they 
were  tolerated  by  the  planters  for  the  two  hundred  thou 
sand  votes  they  gave  for  slavery  and  the  mad  theories  of 
the  planters,  and  added,  "  They  are  far  below  the  slaves 
in  morals  and  civilization;  are  indolent,  shiftless,  thieving, 
lying;  given  to  whisky-drinking,  snuff- dipping,  clay-eating, 
incest,  and  all  manner  of  social  vices.  Not  one  in  a  thou 
sand  of  them  can  read ;  not  one  in  ten  thousand  can  write;'' 
and  that  he  "  had  met  many  who  had  never  seen  a  book  or 
newspaper,  and  some  who  had  never  heard  of  a  Bible  or  a 
spelling-book." 

Mr.  B.  C.  Truman,  an  accredited  correspondent  of  the 
New  York  Times,  in  a  letter  to  that  journal,  dated  Mont 
gomery,  Alabama,  October  23,  1865,  said : 

"  There  is  a^  class  of  beings  in  all  the  southern  States  known  as 
poor  whites.  The  little  monosyllabic  adjective  does  not  give  the 
faintest  idea  of  these  things  with  bodies  and  souls.  How  under  the 
heavens  they  live  is  a  question  for  the  philanthropist,  if  indeed  that 
paragon  of  benevolence  has  ever  visited  the  region  in  which  they 
exist — the  'homes'  of  the  poor  whites.  In  a  visit  to  Spanish  Fort  a 
few  days  ago,  in  company  with  a  naval  officer,  we  stopped  at  the 
'shebang'  of  one  of  this  species.  Most  of  these  poor  whites  are 
natives.  The  individual  whom  we  called  upon,  however,  was  a 
Scandinavian,  but  had  lived  in  the  place  we  found  him  for  thirty 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  23 

years.  For  a  long  time  he  made  his  living  by  manufacturing  tur 
pentine  ;  but  the  trees  ran  out  years  ago,  and  since  then  he  has 
lived  upon  what  he  has  raised,  buying  nothing  but  sugar  arid  coffee, 
for  which  he  traded  chickens  and  eggs.  His  wife  was  of  the  regular 
mold,  lean  and  long,  with  seven  little  children  by  her  side,  arid  a  pipe 
in  her  mouth.  I  told  her  I  was  a  newspaper  correspondent,  and  she 
did  not  know  what  that  was.  I  endeavored  to  explain,  and  found 
that  she  did  not  know  what  a  newspaper  was,  and  yet  she  resides 
within  twenty  miles  of  Mobile.  The  husband  could  not  read  or  write 
his  name,  but  could  drink  like  a  fish.  Both  husband  and  wife  had 
on  wooden  shoes,  while  the  children  exhibited  no  feet  covering  except 
what  nature  had  provided  for  them. 

"  Throughout  the  southern  portion  of  Alabama,  upon  both  sides 
of  the  river,  is  what  is  known  as  the  '  piney  woods  country.'  It  is 
one  of  the  most  barren  sections  I  have  ever  seen.  Neither  corn  nor 
cotton  will  grow  to  any  extent.  Sweet  potatoes  are  the  chief  pro 
duct,  and  this  vegetable  and  bacon,  and  a  little  corn  bread,  form  the 
bill  of  fare  morning,  noon,  and  night  all  the  year  round.  These 
people  are  scattered  all  through  these  piney  woods,  and  live  in  log 
huts  which  in  a  way  protect  them  from  the  tempestuous  weather 
and  violent  storms  of  wind  and  rain  which  howl  through  this  barren 
waste  during  certain  periods  of  the  year.  Oh,  how  I  pity  these  poor 
beings  who  have  been  the  recipients  of  uncounted  woes  and  un 
heard-of  sufferings  during  the  long,  long  years  of  African  slavery  !  " 

Dixon,  the  traveling  correspondent  of  the  Boston  Daily 
Advertiser,  whose  admirable  letters  prove  him  to  be  a 
keen  observer  and  faithful  reporter,  writing  from  Fort 
Valley,  Georgia,  November  loth,  said : 

"  Whether  the  North  Carolina  '  dirt-eater,'  or  the  South  Carolina 
'  sand-hiller,'  or  the  Georgia  '  cracker,'  is  lowest  in  the  scale  of  hu 
man  existence  would  be  difficult  to  say.  The  ordinary  plantation 
negro  seemed  to  me,  when  I  first  saw  him  in  any  numbers,  at  the 
very  bottom  of  not  only  probabilities,  but  also  possibilities,  so  far  as 
they  affect  human  relations  ;  but  these  specimens  of  the  white  race 
must  be  credited  with  having  reached  a  yet  lower  depth  of  squalid 
and  beastly  wretchedness.  However  poor  or  ignorant  or  unclean  or 
improvident  he  may  be,  I  never  yet  found  a  negro  who  had  not  at 
Jeast  a  vague  desire  for  a  better  condition,  an  undefined  longing  for 
something  called  freedom,  a  shrewd  instinct  of  self-preservation. 
These  three  ideas,  or,  let  me  say,  shadows  of  ideas,  do  not  make  the 
creature  a  man,  but  they  lift  him  out  of  the  bounds  of  brutedom. 
The  Georgia  '  cracker,'  as  I  have  seen  him  since  leaving  Milledge- 
ville.  seems  to  me  to  lack  not  only  all  that  the  negro  does,  but  also 
even  the  desire  for  a  better  condition,  and  the  vague  longing  for  an 
enlargement  of  his  liberties  and  his  rights.  I  walked  out  into  the 
country  back  of  Albany  and  Andersonville,  when  at  those  places, 
and  into  the  country  back  of  Fort  Valley  this  morning  ;  and  on 
each  occasion  I  fell  in  with  three  or  four  of  these  '  cracker  '  fami 
lies.  Such  filthy  poverty,  such  foul  ignorance,  such  idiotic  imbe 
cility,  such  bestial  instincts,  such  groveling  desires,  such  mean  long 
ings,  you  would  question  my  veracity  as  a  man  if  I  were  to  paint 
the  pictures  I  have  seen !  Moreover,  no  trick  of  words  can  make 


24  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

plain  the  scene  in  and  around  one  of  these  habitations  ;  no  fertility 
of  language  can  embody  the  simple  facts  for  a  northern  mind ;  and 
the  case  is  one  in  which  even  seeing  itself  is  scarcely  believing. 
Time  and  effort  will  lead  the  negro  up  to  intelligent  manhood  ;  but 
I  almost  doubt  if  it  will  be  possible  to  ever  lift  this  '  white  trash ' 
into  respectability." 

Sir,  is  not  the  gentleman  from  Indiana  mistaken  in  as 
serting  that  free  trade  "  is  the  true  theory  of  government," 
and  can  a  policy  which  produces  such  results  as  these  writers 
have  depicted  be  wise  ?  Can  we  rely  on  it  to  pay  the 
interest  on  our  debt,  to  meet  the  pensions  we  owe  to  those 
who  have  been  disabled  in  our  service,  or  to  the  widows 
and  children,  or  aged  and  dependent  parents  of  those  who 
have  laid  down  their  lives  in  our  cause  ?  Such  free  trade 
as  he  advocates  can  produce  but  one  result ;  and  that  is 
bankruptcy,  personal,  corporate,  State,  and  national.  It 
is  against  the  laws  of  nature  and  the  providence  of  God. 
It  involves  as  a  necessary  consequence  idleness  for  one 
half  the  year  to  all,  and  for  all  the  year  to  many  of  our 
people  who  would  find  adequate  and  remunerative  em 
ployment  under  a  system  of  diversified  industry. 

HOW  ENGLAND  ESTABLISHED  HER  SUPREMACY. 

The  propositions  I  enunciate  are  not  deduced  from  our 
experience  alone.  All  history  affirms  them.  Other  na 
tions  have  tried  free  trade  and  ever  with  the  same  result. 
England,  the  workshop  of  the  world  and  mistress  of  the 
seas  as  she  proclaims  herself,  tried  it,  and  from  the  time  of 
Alfred  to  that  of  Edward  the  Confessor,  sold  her  skins 
for  a  sixpence,  and  bought  back  the  tails  for  a  shilling,  by 
exchanging  her  unwrought  wool  for  Dutch  and  Flemish 
clothing  ;  and  the  question  as  to  how  population  might  be 
prevented  from  exceeding  the  ability  of  the  land  to  feed 
the  people  perplexed  her  rulers  throughout  the  long 
period.* 

*  Believing  herself  to  be  strong  enough  she  has  renewed  the  experiment,  and 
at  the  end  of  a  quarter  of  a  century  of  free  trade,  finds  herself  agitated  as  never 
before  by  the  question,  "  How  shall  we  feed  our  people  ?"  Daniel  Grant  says  : 
"  No  man  doubts  the  broad  fact  that  we  cannot  feed  ourselves.  It  has  been  ac 
cepted  by  Parliamentary  Committees,  made  the  plea  for  large  Inelosure  Acts,  and 
it  caused  the  repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws  ;  equally  as  little  can  it  be  doubted  that 
this  condition  is  ever  on  the  increase,  for  it  is  shown  by  the  Registrar  General's 
returns,  and  the  ever-increasing  competition  for  work.  Day  by  day  the  tell-tale 
of  our  population  mounts  higher,  and  its  results  are  to  be  found  in  the  increas 
ing  requirements  for  foreign  food.  But  at  great  Manchester  meetings  men  tabu 
late  out  this  enormous  increase,  and  appeal  to  it  as  an  evidence  of  the  value  of 
free  trade;  whilst  the  facts  are  that  our  imports  of  food  have  only  the  one  mean 
ing,  viz :  we  import  that  food  which  we  cannot  produce  for  ourselves.  The  re- 


PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR.  25 

Even  so  late  as  the  thirty-sixth  year  of  Elizabeth's 
reigri  a  law  was  enacted  against  "the  erecting  and  main 
taining  of  cottages,"  which,  after  reciting  that  "great  in 
conveniences  have  been  found  by  experience  to  grow  by 
erecting  and  building  of  great  numbers  and  multitudes  of 
cottages  which  are  daily  more  and  more  increased  in  many 
parts  of  this  realm,"  enacts  that  no  such  tenement  shall  be 
erected  unless  four  acres  of  land  be  attached  to  it.  And 
Charles  I.,  in  1630,  issued  a  proclamation  "  against  build 
ing  houses  on  new  foundations  in  London  or  Westminster, 
or  within  three  miles  of  the  city  or  king's  palaces."  This 
proclamation  also  forbade  the  receiving  of  inmates  in  the 
houses  which  would  multiply  the  inhabitants  to  such  an 
excessive  number  that  they  could  neither  be  governed  nor 
fed.  The  population  of  England  has  quadrupled  since 
then,  and  her  modern  capitalists,  regarding  labor  as  raw 
material,  maintain  a  supply  of  laborers  in  sufficient  excess 
of  the  demand  to  cheapen  it  to  the  lowest  point,  to  which 
end  the  British  islands  raise  for  annual  exportation,  a  quar 
ter  of  a  million  of  people,  feeding  them  in  their  unpro 
ductive  infancy  and  childhood. 

The  change  has  been  wrought  by  the  diversification  of 
her  industry,  which  has  been  accomplished  by  so  legislat 
ing  as  to  set  at  work  all  the  poor  of  England  with  the 
growth  of  her  own  lands  ;  and  the  spectacle  which  Ire 
land  presents,  of  years  of  famine,  and  an  industrious  people 
whose  attachment  to  their  native  land  is  intense,  fleeing 
by  millions  from  the  homes  of  their  childhood  and  the 
graves  of  their  ancestors,  is  the  result  of  that  one-sided 
free  trade  which  England,  since  the  Union,  has  forced 
upon  her,  by  which  her  woolen,  worsted,  silk,  cotton,  and 
linen  factories  have  been  destroyed.  Protected  by  her 

lation  that  food  thus  bears  to  our  population  makes  itself  felt  in  a  variety  of 
ways  ;  it  changes  the  character  of  our  pauperism,  the  conditions  of  our  destitu 
tion,  and  the  price  of  food  itself;  it  also  enforces  the  importance  of  our  export 
trade  and  the  danger  of  foreign  competition.  All  these  circumstances,  so  appa 
rently  remote,  are  Jinked  together  by  the  one  tie,  that  our  land  cannot  feed  our 
people. 

"  With  respect  to  the  first  point,  the  state  of  our  pauperism,  it  is  so  changed 
that  it  no  longer  represents  its  original  elements.  The  first  poor-law  was  based 
on  the  idea  that  paupers  were  the  idle  and  the  worthless,  and  to  such  a  labor 
test  was  the  na.tural  limitation  of  help  ;  but  to-day  men  seek  work  and  cannot 
find  it,  enforced  idleness  saps  energy,  and  thus  it  is  they  sink  slowly  down  to 
pauperism.  The  same  may  be  said  of  destitution  with  even  greater  force;  that 
silent,  hopeless,  broken  misery,  which  is  too  powerless  to  create  work,  too  feeble 
to  force  it,  and  too  proud  to  heg — that  poverty  which  sinks,  sutlers,  and  dies; 
that  destitution  of  all  others  the  most  fearful,  and  the  most  real,  also  springs 
from  over-population. " — Home  Politics,  by  JJanitl  Grant,  p<«je  161).  London,  1STO. 


26  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN  LABOR. 

legislation  of  1783,  these  and  other  branches  of  diversified 
industry  were  prosperous  and  her  people  contented  at  the 
date  of  the  Union.  But  English  free  trade  having  done 
its  work  nothing  is  now  of  so  little  value  in  Ireland  as  an 
able-bodied  laborer  with  a  good  appetite.  Let  him  who 
would  understand  the  causes  of  the  miseries  of  the  Irish 
people  and  the  depopulation  of  Ireland  read  the  thirteenth 
chapter  of  Henry  C.  Carey's  Slave  Trade,  Domestic  and 
Foreign.  It  is  a  brief  story,  but  pregnant  with  instruc 
tion  upon  the  point  under  consideration. 

I  cannot  tell,  sir,  when  England  first  determined  to 
abandon  dependence  on  the  production  and  exportation  of 
raw  materials,  but  find  by  reference  to  McCallagh's  Indus 
trial  History,  page  74,  that  in  1337  she  passed  an  Act  im 
posing 

"A  duty  of  forty  shillings  per  sack  on  all  wool  exported  by  native 
merchants  and  sixty  shillings  on  all  exported  by  foreigners.  The 
next  year  a  Parliament  was  held  at  Westminster  that  went  still  fur 
ther  in  the  same  direction,  enacting  that  no  wool  of  English  growth 
should  be  transported  beyond  seas,  and  that  all  cloth-workers  should 
be  received,  from  whatever  parts  they  should  come,  and  fit  places 
should  be  assigned  them  with  divers  liberties  and  privileges,  and 
that  they  should  have  a  certain  allowance  from  the  king  until  they 
might  be  in  a  way  of  living  by  their  trade." 

While  England  remained  a  purely  agricultural  country 
her  capitalists  encountered  the  difficulties  which  those  of 
the  South  have  to  overcome,  and  Wade,  in  his  History  of 
the  Middle  and  Working  Classes,  page  31,  says : 

"  In  the  year  1376  we  have  evidence  of  a  strong  disposition  to 
vagrancy  among  laborers,  in  a  complaint  of  the  House  of  Commons 
that  masters  are  obliged  to  give  their  servants  high  wages  to  pre 
vent  their  running  away  ;  that  many  of  the  runaways  turned  beg 
gars  and  lived  idle  lives  in  cities  and  boroughs,  although  they  have 
sufficient  bodily  strength  to  gain  a  livelihood  if  willing  to  work,  and 
that  the  chief  part  turned  out  sturdy  rogues,  infesting  the  kingdom 
with  frequent  robberies." 

There  are  those  who  utter  such  complaints  in  our  days, 
and  especially  deplore  the  fact  that  they  "  are  compelled 
to  give  their  servants  high  wages  to  prevent  their  running 
away."  At  a  meeting  of  the  planters  of  Marlboro'  dis 
trict,  South  Carolina,  the  proceedings  of  which  I  find  re 
ported  at  length,  and  properly  attested,  in  the  Charleston 
Daily  News  of  December  9th,  the  following,  with  many 
iike  resolutions,  were  adopted  : 


PROTECTION  TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  27 

"  Resolved,  That,  if  inconsistent  with  the  views  of  the  authorities 
to  remove  the  military,  we  express  the  opinion  that  the  plan  of  the 
military  to  compel  the  freedman  to  contract  with  his  former  owner, 
when  desired  by  the  latter,  is  wise,  prudent,  and  absolutely  neces 
sary. 

"  Resolved,  That  we,  the  planters  of  the  district,  pledge  ourselves 
not  to  contract  with  any  freedman  unless  he  can  produce  a  certifi 
cate  of  regular  discharge  from  his  former  owner. 

"  Resolved,  That  under  no  circumstances  whatsoever  will  we  rent 
land  to  any  freedmen,  nor  will  we  permit  them  to  live  on  our  prem 
ises  as  employe's. 

"  Resolved,  That  no  system  can  be  devised  for  the  present  which 
can  secure  success  where  the  discipline  and  management  of  the 
freedman  is  entirely  taken  out  of  the  hands  of  the  planter,  and  we 
invoke  the  authorities  to  recognize  this  fact,  which  cannot  but  be 
apparent  to  them. 

"  Resolved,  That  we  request  the  military  to  cease  the  habit  of 
making  negroes  act  as  couriers,  sheriffs,  and  constables,  to  serve 
writs  and  notices  upon  planters — a  system  so  destructive  to  good 
order  and  discipline." 

It  is  evident  that  neither  the  thunders  of  Gillmore's 
"  swamp  angel,"  nor  the  howl  of  her  ponderous  shells,  had 
sufficed  to  awaken  these  somnolent  gentlemen  to  consci 
ousness  of  the  fact  that  the  fourteenth  century  had  passed 
in  the  Palmetto  State. 

Englishmen  in  those  early  days  exhibited  the  same  ele 
ments  of  character  as  the  negroes  of  our  days,  showing 
that  however  the  complexion  of  races  may  differ,  the  im 
pulses  and  yearnings  of  humanity  are  the  same  in  all 
times  and  among  the  children  of  all  climes.  Each  man 
embraces  the  elements  of  perfect  manhood  and  the  germ 
of  every  human  faculty  and  emotion  ;  and  the  Africo- 
American,  in  his  new-found  freedom,  desires,  as  did  the 
English  laborer  of  the  fourteenth  century,  to  work  for 
whom  he  pleases,  at  what  he  feels  he  can  do  best,  and 
in  the  field  wrhich  will  give  him  the  amplest  reward. 

Slight  as  the  stimulants  applied  to  British  manufacturing 
industry  by  parliamentary  protection  had  then  been,  they 
caused  the  land- holders  to  manifest  as  much  anxiety  for 
despotic  control  over  the  laboring  people  as  do  the  par 
doned  rebels  of  the  South ;  and  Wade  tells  us  that  the 
complaints  of  the  Commons  in  1406  furnish  evidence  of 
the  competition  which  had  commenced  between  rural  and 
manufacturing  industry  at  that  day,  and  that — 

"  To  avoid  the  statutes  passed  some  years  before  for  compelling 
those  who  had  been  brought  up  to  the  plow  till  they  were  twelve 
years  of  age  to  continue  in  husbandry  all  their  lives,  agricultural 


28  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN    LABOR. 

laborers  had  recourse  to  the  expedient  of  sending  their  children  into 
cities  and  boroughs,  and  binding  them  apprentices  when  they  were 
under  that  age  ;  and  that  further,  in  order  to  counteract  this,  it  was 
enacted  that  no  person,  unless  possessed  of  land  of  a  rental  of 
twenty  shillings  a  year  should  bind  children  of  any  age  apprentices 
to  any  trade  or  mystery  within  a  city,  but  that  the  children  should 
be  brought  up  in  the  occupation  of  their  parents,  or  other  business 
suited  to  their  conditions." 

P  But  even  in  those  dark  days  the  British  Government 
seems  to  have  been  more  enlightened  than  they  who  claim 
the  right  to  legislate  for  the  Southern  States,  or  Brevet 

^Brigadier  General  Fullerton,  late  Commissioner  of  the 
Freedmen's  Bureau  at  New  Orleans ;  for  it  provided  that 
such  children  were  nevertheless  to  be  allowed  to  be  sent  to  a 
school  in  anjr  part  of  the  kingdom  ;  which  their  proposed 
legislation  and  his  arbitrary  orders  for  the  government  of 
the  laboring  people  of  Louisiana  would  effectually  prohibit. 
These  stupid  parliamentary  restrictions  on  the  freedom 
of  laborers  were  not  to  edure  forever,  and  the  progress  of 
England  in  the  development  of  her  resources  has  been 
marked  by  a  constantly-growing  system  of  protection,  not 
always  judicious,  sometimes  infringing  the  rights  of  the 
subject,  but  tending  constantly  to  build  up  the  power  of 
the  kingdom,  increase  the  material  comfort  of  the  subject, 
and  give  her  ascendency  over  the  nations  of  the  world. 

In  1727,  Dean  Swift,  appealing  to  the  Irish  people  in 
behalf  of  Ireland,  said : 

"  One  cause  of  a  country's  thriving  is  the  industry  of  the  people 
in  working  up  all  their  native  commodities  to  the  last ;  another,  the 
conveniency  of  safe  ports  and  havens  to  carry  out  their  goods,  as 
much  manufactured,  and  bring  those  of  others  as  little  manufactured, 
as  the  nature  of  mutual  commerce  will  allow ;  another,  the  disposi 
tion  of  the  people  of  the  country  to  wear  their  own  manufactures 
and  import  as  little  clothing,  furniture,  food,  or  drink  as  they  can 
conveniently  live  without." 

These  were  not  abstract  notions  with  him,  for  by  that 
time  England  had  become  thoroughly  protective  in  her 
policy,  and  was  increasing  in  population,  wealth,  and 
power  ;  while  Ireland,  though  not  wholly  disregarding  the 
necessity  of  protecting  her  own  workmen  and  developing 
her  resources,  exhibited  a  tendency  to  be  governed  by 
that  plausible  but  shallowest  of  economical  sophisms 
which  teaches  that  it  is  wise,  regardless  of  all  other  cir 
cumstances  and  conditions,  to  buy  where  we  can  buy  for 
least  money  and  sell  where  we  can  sell  for  most,  and  was 


PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR.  29 

sinking  in  the  scale  of  national  consideration.  How  pro- 
tective  England  had  become,  is  illustrated  by  the  fact  that 
from  having  for  many  centuries  exchanged  her  raw  wool 
for  manufactured  cloths,  she  had  in  1660  prohibited  the 
exportation  of  unmanufactured  wool.  This  prohibition 
continued  till  1825.  And  to  protect  her  silk  manufactur 
ers,  from  1765  to  1826,  she  prohibited  the  importation  of 
silk  goods  manufactured  in  other  countries,  and  confirmed 
the  parliamentary  prohibition  by  a  reservation  in  the 
treaty  of  commerce  concluded  with  France  in  1786.  She 
also  prohibited  the  export  of  tools  and  machines  used  in 
various  branches  of  manufactures.  In  1696  she  prohibited 
by  special  act  of  Parliament  the  exportation  of  Lee's 
stocking- frame — a  machine  invented  nearly  a  century  be 
fore.  She  also  prohibited  by  various  acts  the  exporta 
tion  of  certain  machinery  used  in  woolen,  silk,  cotton, 
and  linen  manufactures.  Such  favor  did  protection  to 
English  labor  find  that  her  laws  prohibiting  exportation 
were  made  to  embrace  presses  or  dies  for  iron  buttons, 
engines  for  covering  whips,  tools  for  punching  glass ;  in 
fact,  anything  for  which  it  was  thought  worth  while  on 
the  part  of  any  class  of  manufacturers  or  mechanics  to 
seek  protection  at  the  hands  of  Parliament  by  securing 
Englishmen  a  monopoly  of  the  implements  required  for 
the  production  of  their  goods. 

And  when,  in  1824,  a  commission,  created  to  inquire  into 
the  expediency  of  repealing  these  prohibitions,  reported 
generally  in  favor  of  the  repeal,  it  was  unable  to  recom 
mend  their  unconditional  abrogation,  but  qualified  the 
suggestion  by  recommending  that  the  Privy  Council  should 
continue  to  exercise  their  discretion  in  permitting  the  ex 
portation  of  such  tools  and  machinery  then  prohibited  as 
might  appear  to  them  not  likely  to  be  prejudicial  to  the 
trade  or  manufactures  of  the  United  Kingdom,  "  because 
it  is  possible  that  circumstances  may  exist  which  may 
render  a  prohibition  to  export  certain  tools  and  machines 
used  in  some  particular  manufactures  expedient."  To 
justify  even  this  conditional  repeal  the  commission  set 
forth  the  advantages  England  had  derived  from  the  pro- 
tection  of  her  infant  or  feeble  industries  in  the  following 
language : 

"  Placed  beyond  all  comparison  at  the  head  of  civilization  as  re 
gards  manufacturing1  skill,  with  capital  far  more  ample  than  is  pos 
sessed  by  any  other  people,  with  cheap  and  inexhaustible  supplies  of 


30  PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR. 

iron  and  fuel,  and  with  institutions  every  way  favorable  to  the  de 
velopment  of  the  industry  and  ingenuity  of  her  citizens,  she  must 
always  be  able  at  least  to  maintain  her  superiority  of  position  where 
circumstances  are  in  other  respects  equal,  arid  be  ready  to  turn  to 
the  utmost  advantage  every  improvement  which  may  reach  her  in 
common  with  her  less  powerful  rivals." 

It  was  not,  we  perceive,  until  by  adequate  protection  to 
her  labor  she  had  kept  the  balance  of  trade  in  her  favor 
long  enough  to  make  capital  so  abundant  as  to  secure  a 
steady  and  ample  supply  of  money  at  low  rates  of  interest ; 
and  by  setting  all  her  people  to  work  on  the  growth  of 
her  lands  had  trained  artisans  and  accumulated  an  abun 
dance  of  superior  machinery,  which  had  paid  for  itself  by 
profits  on  its  use,  that  England  was  willing  to  admit 
the  labor  of  the  world  to  compete  with  that  employed  in 
her  varied  industries. 

Nor  had  she  resorted  to  these  devices  alone  in  her  pro 
gress  to  this  assured  position,  for  an  English  writer,  Porter, 
in  Bis  history  of  the  Progress  of  the  Nation,  says : 

"  Previous  to  1825,  the  jealousy  of  our  Legislature  in  regard  to 
the  progress  of  foreign  manufactures  was  extended  so  far  as  to  in 
terfere  even  with  the  natural  right  of  working  artisans  to  transfer 
their  industry  to  countries  where  it  could  be  most  profitably,  exerted. 
Any  man  who  had  acquired  a  practical  knowledge  of  manufacturing 
processes  was  thereby  rendered  a  prisoner  iri  his  own  country,  and 
not  only  might  the  arm  of  the  law  be  interposed  to  prevent  his 
quitting  his  native  shores,  but  heavy  penalties  were  imposed  on  all 
persons  who  should  abet  the  expatriation  of  one  of  our  artisans." 

ENGLAND  PREACHES  BUT  DOES  NOT  PRACTICE  FREE 
TRADE. 

These,  however,  were  not  the  most  effective  means  by 
which  England  has  protected  her  capital  arid  augmented 
her  power.  While  prohibiting  the  exportation  of  tools 
and  machines,  and  restraining  her  skilled  workmen  from 
emigrating,  she  was,  from  so  early  as  1337,  as  we  have 
already  seen,  encouraging  by  special  grants  and  privileges 
the  artisans  of  other  countries  to  bring  the  implements  of 
their  industry  and  employ  them  within  her  limits.  Her 
policy  is  unchanged.  The  free  trade  she  proclaims  is  theo 
retical  and  plausible,  but  to  some  extent  false  and  delusive.* 

*  England's  enormous  annual  subsidies  to  Steamship  Companies  are  part  of 
an  ingenious  system  of  protection  by  which  she  hopes  to  maintain  a  monopoly 
of  ship  building  and  the  carrying  trade.  She  thus  pays  part  of  the  freight  on 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  31 

The  world  hailed  her  admission  of  foreign  grain  free  as  a 
step  toward  really  reciprocal  free  trade.  Her  statesmen, 
however,  saw  in  it  a  master-stroke  by  which  her  manu 
facturing  supremacy  would  be  maintained.  Sir  Robert 
Peel  knew  that  the  manufactures  of  England  were  the 
source  of  her  power ;  that  cheap  food  for  her  laborers 
was  an  element  of  cheap  production ;  and  believed  that  so 
i  long  as  other  nations  would  employ  her  to  manufacture 
their  raw  materials  it  was  immaterial  whether  she  raised 
any  grain,  and  that  every  acre  of  her  arable  land  not 
required  to  raise  vegetables  and  fruits  which  do  not  bear 
transportation,  might  be  appropriated  to  sheep  walks  and 
pasturage,  and,  through  her  diversified  industry  she 
would  draw  from  the  prairies  of  the  United  States, 
the  banks  of  the  Nile,  and  the  shores  of  the  Baltic  a  sup 
ply  of  food  far  more  generous  than  the  insular  dimensions 
of  England  could  possibly  yield. 

Her  policy  is  to  undersell  all  others.  To  do  this  she 
must  depress  the  wages  of  labor,  and  to  accomplish  this 
she  must  provide  her  laboring  people  at  the  lowest  possi 
ble  prices  with  the  simple  and  coarse  fare  on  which  her 
low  wages  compel  them  to  live.  To  have  retained  the 
duties  on  grain  would  have  been,  in  so  far,  to  tax  raw 
materials,  as  we  do,*  but  she  is  too  astute  for  that.  She 
wants  cheap  food  for  her  slaves  as  the  southern  planters 
did  for  theirs,  and  seeks  to  get  it  as  they  did  by  forcing 
British  free  trade  on  the  American  people.  She  is  the 
foe  of  the  working-men  of  every  country,  and  impairs 
their  wages  by  depressing  those  of  the  men  upon  whose 
toil  her  own  power  depends.f  She  protects  the  capital  of 


foreign  raw  materials  used  by  her  manufacturers,  and  the  fabrics  and  wares 
they  export.  These  subsidies  amounted  last  year,  as  was  stated  by  the  Chancellor 
of  the  Exchequer  in  his  speech  of  April  20th,  1871,  when  presenting  to  Parlia 
ment  his  budget  for  this  year,  to  £1,225,000,  or  over  $6,000,000. 

*The  Act  of  July  14th,  1870,  reduced  the  duty  on  tea  and  coffee  and  trans 
ferred  to  the  free  list  many  varieties  of  raw  material  which  we  cannot  yet  pro 
duce  ;  and  I  hope  that  Congress  will,  during  the  next  session,  make  tea  and  coffee 
free.  The  harmless  stimulants  taken  morning  and  evening  by  the  farmer  and 
laborer  should  not  be  taxed. 

f  Let  us  for  a  moment  think  what  are  the  conditions  of  our  poor  to-day.  Apart 
from,  the  question  of  our  agricultural  population,  whose  almost  hopeless  lot  is  best 
told  by  the  simple  fact,  that  in  many  places  the  luxury  of  meat  is  comparatively 
unknown ;  apart  from  the  questions  of  special  emergency,  such  as  the  cotton 
famine,  or  the  East  End  Emigration  Society,  which  hag  been  brought  into  exis 
tence  for  the  purpose  of  relieving  the  great  mass  of  destitution  and  poverty  in 


32  PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR. 

England  as  I  wish  to  protect  the  labor,  ingenuity,  and  en 
terprise  of  the  American  people.  Her  aim  is  to  be  the 
workshop  of  the  world,  and  to  bind  the  people  of  all 
other  lands  to  the  rude  employments  of  unskilled  agri 
culture. 

Her  agricultural  interests  resisted  the  repeal  of  the  corn 
laws.  To  admit  grain  duty  free  it  was  said  would  ruin 
the  farmers  and  lessen  the  market  and  taxable  value  of 
the  land  of  the  kingdom.  But  experience  demonstrated 
the  laws  of  social  science  and  proved  the  harmony  of  in 
terests  by  increasing  the  agricultural  products  of  England 
in  a  ratio  equal  to  the  increased  amount  of  her  import  of 
raw  material  and  food  for  her  land  and  people. 

FREE   TRADE   EXHAUSTS   LAND   AND   IMPOVERISHES 
FARMERS. 

I  have  said,  sir,  that  a  nation  cannot  prosper  by  foreign 
trade  and  agriculture  alone ;  and  our  bitter  experience 
of  wasted  lands  and  oft-recurring  bankruptcy,  contrasted 
with  the  steadily  increasing  affluence  of  the  agriculturists 
of  England,  confirms  the  fact.  Let  us  examine  this  ques 
tion.  We  boast  ourselves  an  agricultural  people,  and  are 
content  to  look  to  nations  beyond  the  seas  for  the  fabrics 
we  consume  and  a  market  for  our  products.  Not  having 
a  home  market  we  cannot  diversify  our  crops,  but  must 
confine  ourselves  to  the  production  of  those  commodities 


that  neighborhood;  apart  from  nil  such  special  and  exceptional  cases,  we  have 
the  general  sense  of  depression  and  want  everywhere  spread  around  us.  It  is 
not  necessary  to  dwell  on  the  scenes  of  human  misery,  where  wholesale  suicides 
or  cruel  murders  mark  the  profound  despair  of  those  who  lay  trembling  on  tie 
confines  of  want.  It  is  equally  unnecessary  to  recall  those  verdicts  that  appear 
time  after  time  at  coroner's  inquests  under  the  simple  but  expressive  phraseology 
— "Death  from  Starvation."  It  is  not  necessary  to  recall  these  things,  because 
the  newspaper  press  of  the  country  drives  these  truths  borne  without  stint  and 
without  compromise ;  but  it  may  be  important  to  remember  that  the  individual 
cases,  which  thus  come  to  the  surface,  are  known  only  by  accident,  and  that  the 
great  mass  of  misery  that  suffers  and  dies, — dies  and  tells  no  tale.  Occasionally 
and  by  accident  the  curtain  is  drawn  on  one  side,  and  we  see  into  the  midst  of 
the  life  of  poverty  that  surrounds  us  ;  and  we  then  know  by  the  glance  thus 
afforded  us,  what  the  general  life  must  be;  wasted  by  poverty,  decimated  by 
fever,  shattered  by  want;  and  it  thus  rises  before  us,  in  the  full  force  of  its  ap 
peal  to  that  sense  of  human  sympathy  which  is  common  to  us  all.  But  the 
general  acceptance  of  the  positions  here  stated  will  be  aided  by  a  few  facts.  Let 
us  see  what,  the  barometer  of  pauperism  has  to  tell  us.  Our  pa.uper  population 
in  1866,  was  920,344;  in  1867,  958,824;  in  1868,  1,034,823;  and  the  number  ia 
still  increasing  ;  yet  these  numbers  show  that  our  pauper  population  has  in 
creased  114,479  persons  in  two  years,  or  at  the  rate  of  more  than  10UO  per 
week. — Home  Politics,  by  Daniel  Grant,  p.  3.  London,  1870. 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN    LABOR.  33 

which  will  keep  long  and  will  bear  transportation.  Wheat, 
corn,  pork,  cotton,  rice,  tobacco,  and  hemp  are  our  great 
staples,  and  our  crops,  omitting  those  produced  within  a 
radius  around  the  large  cities,  narrowing  as  they  diminish 
in  importance,  decrease  from  year  to  year,  while  those  of 
England,  stimulated  and  varied  by  a  home  market,  in 
crease  so  wonderfully  that  science  pauses  before  declaring 
that  she  has  yet  ascertained  the  measure  of  wealth  a  single 
well-fed  acre  under  scientific  culture  will  yield.  The 
virgin  soil  of  America  gives  back  to  the  farmer  at  least 
thirty  bushels  of  wheat  to  the  acre  ;  and  in  his  early  crops 
he  does  not  fear  the  Hessian  fly,  the  midge,  weevil,  or  any 
insect-destroyer  of  grain.  In  the  old  wheat-growing 
States  remote  from,  cities,  the  same  amount  of  labor  be 
stowed  upon  an  acre  is  rewarded  by  but  seven  or  at  best 
ten  bushels,  and  the  farmer  regards  himself  as  lucky  whose 
fields  are  not  visited  once  ill  three  years  by  some  of  the 
deadly  foes  to  wheat — the  insects  that  live  and  swarm  upon 
the  diseased  juices  of  feeble  grain,  the  offspring  of  fam 
ished  soil.  The  most  carefully-prepared  tables  I  have 
been  able  to  find  give  twelve  bushels  or  less  as  the  average 
wheat  crop  per  acre  of  America. 

In  England  the  fields  are  enriched  by  the  bones,  woolen 
rags,  and  other  nutritious  manures  which  we  export ;  the 
grain  crop  is  followed  by  a  green  crop,  or  those  vegeta 
bles,  the  tops  of  which  absorb  from  the  atmosphere  and 
return  to  the  earth  the  aliment  abstracted  by  cereals  ;  and 
the  amount  of  labor  which,  when  England  was  a  purely 
agricultural  country,  drew  but  from  twelve  to  fifteen 
bushels  of  wheat  from  an  acre,  is  now  rewarded  by  from 
thirty-eight  to  forty-three  bushels,  or  the  equivalent 
thereof  in  roots  for  the  sustenance  of  man  and  beast. 
Under  our  exhausting  process  of  extorting  from  famished 
fields  the  last  elements  of  the  white  crop,  and  our  ex 
portation  of  fertilizers  and  manures,  our  very  fruit  crop 
is  disappearing.  The  diseased  trees  of  the  orchard,  th 
apple,  the  pear,  the  plum,  blossom  and  bring  forth  fruit 
and  the  borer,  the  curculio,  and  others  of  the  insect  tribe 
that  are  sent  to  scourge  us  into  good  husbandrv,  revel 
in  it,  and  it  falls  before  maturity  as  if  to  give  some  sub 
sistence  to  the  starved  stem  that  gave  it  its  sickly  life. 
This  is  no  fancy  sketch.  In  endeavoring  to  sell  in  the 
dearest  money  markets  and  buy  where  we  can  buy  for 
least  money,  we  have  sold  the  very  life  of  our  acres  and 
3 


34  PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN    LABOR. 

mortgaged  ourselves  to  a  class  of  middle-men,  mostly  for 
eigners,  who  take  the  results  of  our  industry  as  the  price 
of  carrying  our  products  to  market  and  bringing  us  the 
few  and  inferior  commodities — the  tails — we  receive  in 
return  for  our  skins.  Our  life  is  an  inevitable  game  of 
cross  purposes.  Ambitious  of  commercial  importance  we 
produce  only  raw  materials  and  can  have  no  commerce, 
but  must  enhance  the  maritime  power  of  our  rival  by  em 
ploying  her  ships,  sailors,  and  merchants  to  do  our  carry 
ing;  and  while  eager  to  keep  down  our  steadily-increasing 
foreign  indebtedness  we  ship  our  least  bulky  but  most 
potent  manures  in  the  same  British  vessels  that  carry 
away  our  cotton,  corn,  and  gold.  The  real  balance  of 
trade  is  ever  against  us,  and  our  debts — commercial,  coipo- 
rate,  and  State — are  ever  increasing.  Let  us  mine  gold 
and  silver  never  so  fast,  we  can  keep  none  of  it.  Our 
suspensions  of  specie  payments  are  periodical.  England 
maintains  the  balance  of  trade  as  steadily  in  her  favor ; 
and  her  statisticians  calculate  that  her  annual  accumula 
tion  of  capital  has  attained  the  enormous  dimensions  of 
£50,000,000  or  $250,000,000.  Her  limits  offer  no  invest 
ments  for  this  annual  increase,  and  the  managers  of  the 
railroads  that  carry  our  crops  over  our  own  soil  to  the  sea 
board  for  shipment  extort  exorbitant  freights  to  enable 
them  to  pay  interest  on  bonds  sold  at  low  rates  to  foreign 
holders,  or  pay  large  dividends  to  British  capitalists  who, 
in  default  of  other  investments  offering  profits  equally 
great,  have  taken  the  stock.  Without  manufactures  we 
can  have  neither  foreign  trade  nor  commercial  marine ; 
for  a  purely  agricultural  people,  depending  on  foreign  na 
tions  for  a  limited  market,  have  nothing  with  which  to 
freight  vessels  to  the  general  markets  of  the  world,  and 
no  assorted  commodities  to  exchange  for  those  that  would 
enrich  the  country  and  build  up  upon  the  sea-board  com 
mercial  emporiums  with  native  citizens  and  American  in 
terests. 

But,  sir,  let  us  look  a  little  more  closely  at  the  effect  on 
the  land  of  the  country  of  the  mad  theories  propounded  by 
the  gentleman  from  Indiana.  Professor  Henry  gave  it  as 
his  opinion,  some  years  ago,  (and  I  believe  it  to  be  true 
to-day,)  that  there  was  more  wealth  invested  in  our  soil  in 
fertilizing  matter  at  the  moment  this  country  was  dis 
covered  by  Columbus  than  there  is  at  present  above  the 
surface  in  improvements  and  all  other  investments.  Ohio, 


PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR.  35 

justly  proud  of  her  comparatively  superior  American 
agriculture,  was  admonished  by  John  H.  Klippart,  Esq., 
corresponding  secretary  of  her  State  Board  of  Agriculture 
in  1860,  that  her  staple  crop,  wheat,  was  annually  decreas 
ing  in  its  yield  per  acre ;  that  in  less  than  fifty  years  the 
average  product  was  reduced  from  thirty  to  less  than 
fifteen  bushels  per  acre,  and  that  unless  her  farmers  turned 
their  attention,  and  that  very  soon,  to  the  renovation  of 
their  wheat  lands,  even  Ohio  would  soon  be  one  of  the 
non-wheat-producing  States.  During  the  first  five  years 
of  the  last  decade  her  corn  crop  averaged  36TVs  bushels  to 
the  acre,  while  during  the  last  five  years  of  the  decade  its 
average  had  fallen  to  32-nnr-  It  matters  little,  practically, 
whether  a  man  sell  his  acres  or  sell  only  their  vital  prin 
ciples.  It  would  have  been  better,  could  we  have  done  it, 
that  we  had  exported  our  acres  in  all  their  breadth  and 
depth  than  to  have  extracted  from  them  as  we  have,  and 
exported  or  burned  as  fuel  their  productive  power.  We 
should  then  have  seen  that  that  market  in  which  goods 
can  be  bought  for  the  least  money  is  not  always  the 
cheapest,  and  realized  how  fearful  a  price  we  were  paying 
for  the  tails  of  the  skins  we  had  sold  so  recklessly. 

I  have  referred  to  Ohio  as  an  example,  not  because  her 
case  is  exceptional,  but  because  if  it  be  exceptional  it  is  in 
favor  of  her  better  than  average  American  husbandry. 

The  South  has  been  less  desolated  by  war  than  by  long 
continued  unreciprocal  free  trade  with  England.  The 
ravages  of  war  can  soon  be  repaired.  Houses,  canals,  and 
railroads  can  soon  be  rebuilt.  Villages,  as  unimportant 
as  those  of  the  South,  (and  in  this  I  embrace  her  cities  all 
other  than  New  Orleans,)  are  things  of  very  rapid  growth 
in  countries  where  men  are  free  to  exercise  their  skill  or 
enterprise,  and  industry  is  well  rewarded.  But  who  shall 
restore  her  waste  lands  ?  War  was  not  the  demon  that 
blasted  them  ;  it  was  the  free  trade  that  England  imposes 
on  semi-civilized  nations ;  it  was  the  desire  to  create  a 
monopoly  of  the  cotton  and  sugar  trade ;  it  was  the  belief 
that  a  poor  and  ambitious  people  whose  expenditures 
anticipated  their  annual  crop  could  be  victorious  in  a 
commercial  contest  with  a  wealthy  people  whose  diver 
sified  industries  gave  them  the  control  of  all  markets,  and 
whose  accumulations  of  capital  enabled  them  to  choose  their 
own  time  and  place  for  purchasing.  I  will  not  describe  what 
I  have  seen  in  the  South,  or  take  the  reports  brought  by 


36  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN"   LABOR. 

northern  men.     Let  southern  men  describe  the  condition 
of  their  plantations. 

A  southern  journal,  which  is  quoted  by  Carey  in  his 
Social  Science,  but  of  which  the  name  is  not  given,  says : 

"  An  Alabama  planter  says  that  cotton  has  destroyed  more  than 
earthquakes  or  volcanic  eruptions.  Witness  the  red  hills  of  Georgia 
and  South  Carolina,  which  have  produced  cotton  till  the  last  dying 
g-asp  of  the  soil  forbade  any  further  attempt  at  cultivation ;  and  the 
land,  turned  out  to  nature,  reminds  the  traveler,  as  he  views  the 
dilapidated  condition  of  the  country,  of  the  ruins  of  ancient  Greece." 

Dr.  Daniel  Lee,  in  his  Progress  of  Agriculture,  in  the 
United  States  Patent  Office  Eeport  for  1852,  says  : 

"  Cotton  culture  presents  one  feature  which  we  respectfully  com 
mend  to  the  earnest  consideration  of  southern  statesmen  and  plan 
ters,  and  that  is  the  constantly  increasing  deterioration  of  the  soil 
devoted  mainly  to  the  production  of  this  important  crop.  Already 
this  evil  has  attained  a  fearful  magnitude ;  and  under  the  present 
common  practice  it  grows  a  little  faster  than  the  increase  of  cotton 
hales  at  the  South.  Who  can  say  when  or  where  this  ever-augment 
ing  exhaustion  of  the  natural  resources  of  the  cotton-growing  States 
is  to  end,  short  of  their  ruin  ?  " 

De  Bow,  in  his  Eesources  of  the  South,  published  in 
1852,  says : 

"  The  native  soil  of  middle  Georgia  is  a  rich  argillaceous  loam, 
resting  on  a  firm  clay  foundation.  In  some  of  the  richer  counties 
nearly  all  the  lands  have  been  cut  down  and  appropriated  to  tillage ; 
a  large  maximum  of  which  have  been  worn  out,  leaving  a  desolate 
picture  for  the  traveler  to  behold — decaying  tenements,  red  old  hills, 
stripped  of  their  native  growth  and  virgin  soil,  and  washed  into  deep 
gullies,  with  here  and  there  patches  of  Bermuda  grass  and  stunted 
pine  shrubs,  struggling  for  a  scanty  subsistence  on  what  was  once 
one  of  the  richest  soils  of  America." 

Governor  Hammond,  in  an  address  before  the  South 
Carolina  Institute  in  1849,  after  presenting  the  same  class 
of  facts,  said : 

"These  are  not  mere  paper  calculations,  or  the  gloomy  specula 
tions  of  a  brooding  fancy.  They  are  illustrated  and  sustained  by 
facts,  current  facts  of  our  own  day,  within  the  knowledge  of  every 
one  of  us.  The  process  of  impoverishment  has  been  visibly  and 
palpably  going  on  step  by  step  with  the  decline  in  the  price  of 
cotton." 

Clement  C.  Clay,  of  Alabama,  speaking  in  the  United 
States  Senate,  said : 

"  I  can  show  you,  with  sorrow,  in  the  older  portions  of  Alabama, 
in  my  native  county  of  Madison,  the  sad  memorials  of  the  artless 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  37 

and  exhausting  culture  of  cotton.  Our  small  planters,  after  taking 
the  cream  off  their  lands,  unable  to  restore  them  by  rest,  manures, 
or  otherwise,  are  going  further  West  and  South  in  search  of  other 
virgin  lands,  which  they  may  and  will  despoil  and  impoverish  in 
like  manner.  .  .  .In  traversing  that  county,  one  will 

discover  numerous  farm-houses,  once  the  abode  of  industrious  arid 
intelligent  freemen,  now  occupied  by  slaves,  or  tenantless,  deserted, 
and  dilapidated;  he  will  observe  fields,  once  fertile,  now  imfenced, 
abandoned,  and  covered  with  those  evil  harbingers,  foxtail  and 
broomsedge ;  he  will  see  the  moss  growing  on  the  moldering  walls 
of  once  thrifty  villages,  and  will  find  '  one  only  master  grasp  the 
whole  domain '  that  once  furnished  happy  homes  for  a  dozen  white 
families.  Indeed  a  country  in  its  infancy,  where  fifty  years  ago 
scarce  a  forest  tree  had  been  felled  by  the  axe  of  the  pioneer,  is 
already  exhibiting  the  painful  signs  of  senility  and  decay  apparent 
in  Virginia  and  the  Carolinas." 

Dr.  Lee,  in  the  paper  to  which  I  have  already  referred, 
says: 

"  Of  the  land  cultivated  in  this  country,  one  hundred  million 
acres  are  damaged  to  the  extent  of  three  dollars  per  acre  per  an 
num,  or,  in  other  words,  a  complete  restitution  of  the  elements 
of  crops  removed  each  year  cannot  be  made  short  of  an  expense  of 
$300,000,000." 

FREE   TRADE    KEEPS   US   IN   SUBJECTION   TO    ENGLAND'S 
COLONIAL    POLICY. 

Sir,  this  is  a  melancholy  picture  to  contemplate — a 
country  wasted  in  its  youth,  and  its  people  impoverished 
in  the  midst  of  abounding  natural  riches.  And,  sir,  what 
adds  to  its  sombre  character  is  the  fact  that  it  is  not  acci 
dental — that  it  is  not  the  result  of  Providence,  save  as 
Providence  permits  some  men  to  trifle  with  their  rights 
and  interests,  and  others  to  take  advantage  of  their  wicked 
ness,  weakness,  or  folly.  It  is  the  work  of  man ;  it  is  the 
result  of  design ;  it  has  been  brought  about  as  the  end 
sought  to  be  obtained  by  the  sagacious  and  far-seeing 
legislators  who  have  guided  the  counsels  of  Great  Britain 
and  their  allies,  the  free  trade  leaders  of  the  Democratic 
party  of  our  cbuntry.  The  laws  by  which  these  melan 
choly  results  were  produced  are  demonstrable,  and  have 
long  been  well  understood.  They  are  the  golden  rule  as 
administered  by  selfish  and  perfidious  England  to  young 
or  feeble  nations  and  her  own  colonies.  They  were  under 
stood  by  Locke  when  he  prepared  his  essay  on  Civil 
Government.  Dean  Swift,  as  I  have  shown,  expounded 
them  when  he  endeavored  to  inspire  the  people  of  Ireland 
with  wisdom  and  save  to  that  unhappy  country  a  future 


#$  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

They  were  understood  by  Andrew  Gee  when  he  published  , 
his  work  on  Trade  in  1750,  and  among  other  illustrations 
of  his  clear  apprehension  of  them  said : 

"  Manufactures  in  our  American  colonies  should  be  discouraged, 

prohibited We  ought  always  to  keep  a  watchful  eye 

over  our  colonies,  to  restrain  them  from  setting  up  any  of  the  manu 
factures  ivhich  are  carried  on  in  Great  Britain ;  and  any  such 
attempts  should  be  crushed  at  the  beginning Our  colo 
nies  are  much  in  the  same  state  as  Ireland  was  in  when  they  began 
the  woolen  manufactory,  and  as  their  numbers  increase,  will  fall 
upon  manufactures  for  clothing  themselves,  if  due  care  be  not  taken 
to  find  employment  for  them  in  raising  such  productions  as  may 
enable  them  to  furnish  themselves  with  all  the  necessaries  from  us. 
.  As  they  will  have  the  providing  rough  materials  to 
themselves,  so  shall  we  have  the  manufacturing  of  them.  If  encour 
agement  be  given  for  raising  hemp,  flax,  etc.,  doubtless  they  will 
soon  begin  to  manufacture,  if  not  prevented.  Therefore,  to  stop  the 
progress  of  any  such  manufactured  is  proposed  that  no  weaver  have 
liberty  to  set  up  any  looms,  without  first  registering  at  an  office,  kept 

for  that  purpose That  all  slitting-mills,  and  engines  for 

drawing  wire  or  weaving  stockings,  be  put  down That 

all  negroes  be  prohibited  from  weaving  either  linen  or  woolen,  or 
spinning  or  combing  wool,  or  working  at  any  manufacture  of  iron, 
further  than  making  it  into  pig  or  bar  iron.  That  they  also  be  pro 
hibited  from  manufacturing  hats,  stockings,  or  leather  of  any  kind. 
This  limitation  will  not  abridge  the  planters  of  any  liberty  they  now 
enjoy ;  on  the  contrary,  it  will  then  turn  their  industry  to  promot 
ing  and  raising  those  rough  materials If  we  examine 

into  the  circumstances  of  the  inhabitants  of  our  plantations,  and 
our  own,  it  will  appear  that  not  one-fourth  of  their  product  redounds 
to  their  own  profit,  for,  out  of  all  that  comes  here,  they  only  carry 
back  clothing  and  other  accommodations  for  their  families,  all  of 
which  is  of  the  merchandise  and  manufacture  of  this  kingdom. 
.  .  .  .  All  these  advantages  we  receive  by  the  plantations,  be 
sides  the  mortgages  on  the  planters'  estates  and  the  high  interest  they 
pay  us,  which  is  very  considerable."  * 

I  think,  sir,  that  I  have  shown  by  the  extracts  I  have 
made  from  that  remarkable  book,  "  Cotton  is  King,"  that 
the  men  of  the  South  understood  the  laws  of  trade  (certain 
as  that  of  gravitation)  well  enough  to  comprehend  the  fact 
that  free  trade  must  ultimately  destroy  the  varied  inter 
ests  of  the  North.  They  may  not,  mad  with  ambition  as 
they  were,  have  seen  that  the  operation  of  the  laws  whose 
penalties  they  were  inflicting  upon  others  would  involve 
them  in  common  destruction;  but  that  they  understood 
the  fatal  operation  of  free  trade  upon  the  great  interests 
of  the  country  is  apparent  in  every  chapter  of  the  essay 
from  which  I  have  quoted. 

*  See  quotations  from  Thomas  Jefferson  in  Speech  on  Centennial  Celebration, 
Jan.  10,  1871,  supra. 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  39 

I  know  not,  sir,  whether  the  gentleman  from  Indiana 
has  studied  the  laws  of  social  science,  but  they  have  been 
thoroughly  comprehended  by  the  statesmen  of  England, 
and  furnish  the  key  alike  to  her  diplomacy  and  legisla 
tion.  Illustrative  of  this  is  the  case  of  Portugal.  In  the 
latter  part  of  the  seventeenth  century  she  had  established 
manufactures  of  woolen  goods,  which  were  thriving,  add 
ing  to  the  comfort  and  prosperity  of  her  people,  and  to 
her  own  respectability  and  power.  They,  however,  needed 
protection  against  the  hostile  capital  and  more  fully  devel 
oped  industry  of  England,  and  in  1684  the  Government, 
discovering  the  advantages  it  derived  from  these  manu 
factures,  resolved  to  protect  them  by  prohibiting  the  im 
portation  of  foreign  fabrics  of  the  kind.  Thenceforward 
their  increase  was  so  rapid  as  to  attract  the  attention  of 
British  capitalists,  who  determined  upon  their  destruction. 
This  was  not  to  be  accomplished  at  once;  but,  evading 
the  technical  language  of  the  law,  they  manufactured  arti 
cles  under  the  names  and  of  descriptions  not  precisely 
covered  by  the  act  of  prohibition,  which  would  supply 
their  places,  and  threw  them  in  great  abundance  into  the 
Portuguese  markets.*  The  effect  upon  the  industry  of 
the  country  was  soon  felt,  and  the  Government  gave  its 

*  This  device  has  been  practiced  upon  during  the  two  past  years  to  the  great 
detriment  of  the  public  revenue  and  of  the  American  wool  grower  and  manufacturer, 
by  invoicing  woolen  and  worsted  goods  as  manufactures  of  cow  and  calf  hair. 
Mr.  James  Dobson,  in  a  letter  which  appears  in  the  New  York  Daily  Bulletin  of 
January  26th,  1871,  says:  "In  the  first  place,  I  would  say  that  these  so-called 
'calf  hair  cloakings '  are  not  made  from  the  materials  the  importers  say  they  are, 
but  in  place  of  being  made  from  cow  or  calf  hair  are  only  so  in  part — the  balance 
being  wool;  and  some  goods  that  have  been  so  classified  con  tain  nothing  but  wool. 
Out  of  two  hundred  and  eighty-five  invoices  that  had  passed,  between  Julv  1st 
to  Nov.  7th,  1870,  under  the  assumption  of  being  calf  hair,  there  were  seventy 
invoices  of  curled  Astrachans  which,  if  properly  and  honestly  invoiced,  would 
have  paid  duty  as  manufactures  of  worsted  goods.  Samples  of  these  goods  can 
be  seen  in  the  Appraiser's  Office  in  New  York,  if  they  have  not  been  destroyed 
since  Nov.  7th,  1870.  If  they  have,  then  I  can  produce  certified  samples  by  the 
Deputy-Appraiser  who  passed  them.  About  twenty  specimens  of  the  poorer 
quality  of  these  so-called  calf  hair  goods  were  submitted  by  the  Treasury  Depart 
ment  for  microscopic  examination,  for  the  purpose  of  detecting  whether  any  wool 
was  contained  in  them,  and  in  every  instance  wool  was  discovered,  some  speci 
mens  contained  seventy  per  cent,  wool,  while  others  had  variable  proportions. 
You  can  find  this  report  in  the  Treasury  Department  at  Washington.  You  can 
Also  find  it  embodied  in  the  Department  letters,  of  Dec.  7th  and  8th,  1870,  to  the 
Collector  of  the  Port  of  New  York.  Again,  your  correspondent  says  that  the 
assumption  that  one  house  in  Huddersfield  had  sent  nine-tenths  of  these  goods 
to  the  United  States,  is  groundless,  like  the  rest  of  my  statements.  All  I  have 
to  say  to  this  is  that  I  here  quoted  a  portion  of  the  American  Consul's  letter 
written  to  the  Collector  of  New  York,  calling  his  attention  to  the  frauds 
that  were  being  daily  perpetrated  on  the  revenue  of  the  country.  The  letter 
bears  date  September  17th,  1870,  a  copy  of  which  is  on  file  both  in  New  York 


40  PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN    LABOR. 

attention  to  the  matter,  and  prohibited  the  introduction  of 
these  "serges  and  druggets."  But  British  capitalists  were 
as  determined  that  their  fabrics  should  clothe  the  people 
of  Portugal  as  they  have  since  been  that  we  should  con 
sume  their  cotton,  woolen,  steel,  iron,  and  other  goods; 
and  what  they  had  been  unable  to  accomplish  by  the  mere 
force  of  capital  or  by  skilful  evasions  of  Portuguese 
laws,  they  at  last  achieved  by  diplomacy.  Portugal  fail 
ing  to  perceive  that  England  could  not  produce  Portu 
guese  wines,  as  she  cannot  produce  American  cotton,  hemp, 
rice,  tobacco,  and  grain,  listened  to  the  words  of  such 
diplomacy  as  induced  us  to  enter  into  the  Canadian  reci 
procity  treaty,  and  subjected  the  energy,  ingenuity,  and 
industry  of  her  people  to  the  control  of  the  Government 
and  capitalists  of  England  ;  the  inducement  to  this  step, 
artfully  put  forward  by  Great  Britain,  was  that  the  wines 
of  Portugal  should  be  admitted  into  Great  Britain  at  a 
duty  one-third  less  than  that  imposed  on  wines  imported 
from  other  countries.  The  effect  of  this  treaty  on  the  indus 
try  of  Portugal  is  narrated  by  an  English  writer,  who  says  : 

"  Before  the  treaty  our  woolen  cloths,  cloth  serges,  and  cloth 
druggets  were  prohibited  in  Portugal.  They  had  set  up  fabrics 
there  for  making  cloth,  and  proceeded  with  very  good  success,  and 
we  might  justly  apprehend  they  would  have  gone  on  to  erect  other 
fabrics  until  at  last  they  had  served  themselves  with  every  species 
of  woolen  manufactures.  The  treaty  takes  off  all  prohibitions  and 
obliges  Portugal  to  admit  forever  all  our  woolen  manufactures. 
Their  own  fabrics  by  this  were  perfectly  ruined,  and  we  exported 
£100,000  value  in  the  single  article  of  cloths  the  very  year  after  the 
treaty. 

"  The  court  [of  Portugal]  was  pestered  with  remonstrances  from 
their  manufacturers  when  the  prohibition  was  taken  off  pursuant  to 
Mr.  Methuen's  treaty.  But  the  thing  was  passed,  the  treaty  was 
ratified,  and  their  looms  were  all  ruined." — British  Merchantmen, 
vol.  3,  p.  253. 

In  the  spirit  of  the  diplomacy  of  Methuen  was  the  par- 

and   Philadelphia,  also  at  the  Treasury  Department  at  Washington,  and  is  a 
public  document.     He  says  : 

"'  My  attention  having  been  drawn  to  the  fact  that  certain  manufacturers  of 
this  district  have  refused  to  give  calf-hair  certificates  to  the  goods  sold  this  firm 
in  question,  because  they  knew  them  to  be  false  and  did  not  wish  to  perjure  them 
selves  for  the  sake  of  gain,  however  the  impression  gained  ground  that  the 
sworn  certificate  was  only  a  matter  of  form.  I  was  led  to  infer  that  this  house 
in  question  must  be  the  house  who  had  so  misled  the  manufacturer,  and  the 
developments  have  reached  such  a  form  that  I  feel  it  incumbent  on  me  to  call 
the  attention  of  the  revenue  officers  at  New  York  to  all  the  invoices  of  this  firm, 
which  have  passed  through  this  agency.'  " 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  41 

Jiamentary  eloquence  of  Henry,  now  Lord  Brougham,  in 
1815.  Having  described  the  effect  of  the  peace  of  1814, 
which  bound  continental  Europe  to  the  use  of  British 
manufactures,  and  produced  an  excessive  exportation  of 
British  goods  in  that  direction,  he  said  : 

•'The  peace  of  America  has  produced  somewhat  of  the  same 
effect,  though  I  am  very  far  from  placing;  the  vast  exports  which  it 
occasioned  upon  the  same  footing  with  those  to  the  European  market 
the  year  before,  both  because  ultimately  the  Americans  will  pay, 
which  the  exhausted  state  of  the  Continent  renders  very  unlikely, 
and  because  it  was  well  worth  while  to  incur  a  loss  upon  the  first  ex 
portation  in  order  by  the  glut  to  stifle  in  the  cradle  those  rising  manu 
factures  in  the  United  States  which  the  war  has  forced  into  exis 
tence  contrary  to  the  natural  course  of  things." 

Though  I  should  not  pause  here,  I  cannot  abstain  from 
asking  the  gentleman  from  Indiana  whether  he  is  ready  to 
permit  "British  capitalists  "  to  glut  our  markets  and  stifle 
in  the  cradle  the  rising  manufactures  which  the  late  war 
has  called  into  existence  ?  In  further  proof  that  they 
will  do  so,  and  if  we  do  not  protect  them,  throw  the  work 
men  engaged  in  our  furnaces,  forges,  factories  and  work 
shops  out  of  employment,  let  me  add  that  the  commis 
sion  appointed  under  the  provisions  of  the  act  of  5th  and 
6th  Victoria,  chapter  ninety-nine,  showed  how  well  it  un 
derstood  that  the  supremacy  of  Great  Britain  depends  on 
the  maintenance,  at  whatever  cost,  of  her  manufacturing 
supremacy.  In  its  report  to  Parliament  in  1854  it  said  : 

"  I  believe  that  the  laboring  classes  generally,  in  the  manufactur 
ing  districts  of  this  country,  and  especially  in  the  iron  and  coal  dis 
tricts,  are  very  little  aware  of  the  extent  to  which  they  are  often 
indebted  for  their  being  employed  at  all  to  the  immense  losses  which 
their  employers  voluntarily  incur  in  bad  times,  in  order  to  destroy 
foreign  competition,  and  to  gain  and  keep  possession  of  foreign  mar 
kets.  Authentic  instances  are  well  known  of  employers  having  in 
such  times  carried  on  their  work  at  a  loss  amounting  in  the  aggre 
gate  to  three  or  four  hundred  thousand  pounds  in  the  course  of  three 
or  four  years.  If  the  efforts  of  those  who  encourage  the  combi 
nations  to  restrict  the  amount  of  labor,  and  to  produce  strikes,  were 
to  be  successful  for  any  length  of  time,  the  great  accumulations  of 
capital  could  no  longer  be  made  which  enable  a  few  of  the  most 
wealthy  capitalists  to  overwhelm  all  foreign  competition  in  times  of 
great  depression,  and  thus  to  clear  the  way  for  the  whole  trade  to 
step  in  when  prices  revive,  and  to  carry  on  a  great  business  before 
foreign  capital  can  again  accumulate  to  such  an  extent  as  to  be  able 
to  establish  a  competition  in  prices  with  any  chance  of  success. 
The  larqe  capitals  of  this  country  are  the  great  instruments  of  war 
fare  against  the  competing  capitalists  of  foreign  countries,  and  are 


42  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN    LABOR. 

the  most  essential  instruments  now  remaining  by  which  our  manu 
facturing  supremacy  can  be  maintained  ;  the  other  elements — cheap 
labor,  abundance  of  raw  materials,  means  of  communication,  and 
skilled  labor — being  rapidly  in  process  of  being  realized." 

FRANCE,   ENGLAND,    PRUSSIA,    SHODDY 

Nor,  sir,  have  other  nations  failed  to  discover  that  social 
life  is  not  subject  to  chance,  or  to  enforce  what  are  now 
termed  the  laws  of  social  science.  Indeed,  the  more  saga 
cious  and  powerful  nations  have  been  compelled  in  self- 
defence  to  do  what  we — grand  as  are  the  dimensions  and 
resources  of  our  country — must  do  or  be  forever  dependent 
and  subject  to  ever  more  frequently-recurring  periods  of 
bankruptcy,  private,  corporate,  State  and  national. 

Carlyle's  brilliant  word-painting  depicts  the  horrors  that 
flowed  from  contempt  for  the  value  of  labor  in  France, 
and  the  historian  of  the  rebellion  just  crushed  will  portray 
those  which  flowed  from  our  disregard  of  the  rights  of  the 
laboring  people  of  our  country.  Had  Louis  XIV.  appre 
ciated  the  value  and  national  power  of  the  skilled  indus 
try  of  France,  he  would  not  have  revoked  the  edict  of 
Nantes  ;  commenting  upon  which,  Hume  says  : 

"Above  half  a  million  of  the  most  useful  and  industrious  subjects 
deserted  France,  and  exported,  together  with  immense  sums  of 
money,  those  arts  and  manufactures  which  had  chiefly  tended  to  en 
rich  that  country.  .  .  .  Near  fifty  thousand  refugees  passed 
over  into  England." 

Since  the  days  of  Colbert,  however,  with  the  exception 
of  a  brief  term  during  which  she  adherred  to  the  stipula 
tions  of  a  "  reciprocity  treaty,"  into  which  England  in 
veigled  her,  France  has  protected  her  industry  by  pro 
hibitory  acts,  by  bounties  or  concessions,  and  by  high  pro 
tective  duties.  Her  present  astute  ruler  and  the  British 
Government  have  recently  attempted  to  dazzle  and  mis 
lead  other  nations  with  theories  of  free  trade  which  neither 
was  willing  to  carry  into  operation ;  but  the  tariff  act  pre 
pared  by  M.  Chevalier,  after  conference  with  Mr.  Cobden, 
who,  in  his  desire  to  improve  the  condition  of  the  labor 
ing  classes  of  England  by  securing  them  cheap  food,  was 
led  to  adopt  all  the  fallacies  of  the  school  of  free  traders, 
is  perhaps  the  most  scientifically  protective  revenue  law 
ever  devised. 

France  permits  none  of  her  raw  material,  which  is  not 
absolutely  in  excess  of  her  demand  for  food  or  fabrics,  to 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  43 

be  exported  ;  nor  will  she  admit  into  her  ports  any  article 
that  may  come  in  competition  with  her  industry  without 
requiring  it  to  pay  her  and  her  people  adequate  compen 
sation  for  the  injury  such  admission  may  inflict.  A  recent 
illustration  of  this  is  before  us.  The  free-trade  papers  are 
announcing  that  France  has  determined  to  admit  raw 
whalebone  free  of  duty.  They  cannot,  however,  tell  us, 
that  she  has  consented  to  admit  foreign  hops  on  the  same 
terms ;  for  while  inviting  cargoes  of  whalebone  to  her 
ports,  she  has  rejected  an  application  for  the  free  admis 
sion  of  hops.  She  welcomes  the  product  of  the  American 
whaler,  for  whalebone  enters  into  an  infinite  number  of 
her  manufactures.  She  has  no  domestic  source  from 
which  she  can  derive  the  article ;  and  the  duty  upon  it  as 
upon  any  raw  material,  was  a  tax  upon  her  manufacturers, 
or  a  bounty  to  their  rivals.  She  therefore  remits  the 
duty  for  the  same  reason  that  she  taxes  hops.  She  pro 
duces  much  wine,  and  but  little  beer ;  and  her  own  soil 
and  labor  furnish  her  with  an  adequate  supply  of  hops 
for  all  uses  within  her  limits.  To  admit  them  would  be 
to  injure  her  agriculturists,  and  perchance,  to  stimulate  an 
appetite  for  a  beverage  that  might  injure  the  market  for 
French  wines.  We  ship  in  the  same  vessel  our  wheat, 
and  the  bones,  rags,  and  other  refuse  matter  which  would, 
were  our  own  industry  broadly  diversified,  after  applica 
tion  to  many  purposes  of  use  and  pleasure,  restore  to  the 
earth  the  elements  extracted  from  it  by  the  tons  of 
wheat  which  they  accompany  to  foreign  markets.  These 
France,  England,  and  Germany  guard  most  sedulously;  and 
in  a  pamphlet  now  before  me,  entitled  "  The  History  of 
the  Shoddy  Trade,  its  Eise,  Progress,  and  Present  Posi 
tion,"  published  in  London  in  1860,  I  find  that  in  Eng 
land  : ' 

"Materials  regarded  at  one  time  as  almost  worthless,  are  con 
verted,  by  the  improved  processes  of  manual  labor  and  machinery, 
into  valuable  elements  of  textile  manufactures.  The  seams  or  re 
fuse  of  rags  are  used  after  lying  to  rot,  for  the  purpose  of  manuring 
arable  land,  particularly  the  hop  grounds  of  Kent  and  adjacent 
counties,  and  are  also  made  into  flock  partially  for  bedding  and 
stuffing  uses.  They  are,  moreover,  (which  seems  strange  indeed), 
manufactured  into  a  chemical  substance,  namely,  prussiate  of  potash, 
a  valuable  agent  in  dyeing.  Shoddy  dust,  too,  which  is  the  dirt  emit 
ted  from  rags  and  shoddy  in  their  processes,  is  useful  as  tillage  in 
like  manner  with  the  waste  which  falls  under  scribbling-engines. 
TJie  latter  is  saturated  with  oil,  in  which  consists,  mainly,  the  fertilizing 


44  PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN    LABOR. 

property.  Watte  is  of  more  value  than  dust  for  farming  purposes,  the 
former  having  been  generally  about  double  the  price  of  the  latter ;  but 
dust  has  of  late  increased  in  value  so  as  to  be  well,  nigh  equal  to  waste. 
A  large  quantity  of  these  materials  is  annually  sent  from  this  district 
( the  West  Hiding  of  York)  into  Kent  and  other  counties  to  till  the  soil. 
Shoddy  dust  is  useful  in  other  respects  than  as  tillage.  It  is  now 
even  carefully  preserved  in  separate  colors  and  applied  in  the  manu 
facture  of  flock  paper-hangings,  which  are  the  best  description  of 
this  article.  Not  a  single  thing  belonging  to  the  rag  and  shoddy 
system  is  valueless  or  useless.  There  are  no  accumulations  or  moun 
tains  of  debris  to  take  up  room  or  disfigure  the  landscape  ;  all,  good, 
bad,  arid  indifferent,  are  beneficially  appropriated." 

Of  these  valuable  materials  this  little  work  shows  that 
America  furnishes  England  more  than  any  other  nation, 
and  that  in  point  of  quality  her  woolen  rags  are  the  best, 
even  better  than  those  derived  from  the  city  of  London ; 
that  so  largely  are  we  the  consumers  of  the  cloths  manu 
factured  in  greater  or  less  part  from  our  own  refuse  mat 
ter,  that  a  commercial  crisis  in  this  country  affects  every 
manufacturer  in  the  shoddy  districts ;  and  that  the  most 
calamitous  eras  in  the  history  of  the  generally  thriving 
towns  depending  on  this  manufacture  were  the  years  im 
mediately  following  1837  and  1857,  when  their  industry 
was  entirely  suspended  by  the  destruction  of  the  Ameri 
can  market. 

France,  less  lavish  of  her  wealth  and  more  careful  of 
the  welfare  of  her  people  than  we,  sedulously  guards  such 
elements  of  wealth  and  comfort.  How  sedulously,  will 
appear  from  the  following  extract  from  the  little  work  I 
have  just  quoted : 

"As  to  rags,  we  have  not  been  able  to  import  any  from  France, 
on  account  of  their  having  been  prohibited  as  an  article  of  export  ; 
but  according  to  the  treaty  of  commerce  just  concluded  between 
France  and  England  [that  arranged  between  Chevalier  and  Cobden], 
the  former  has  engaged  to  remove  the  prohibition,  but  reserves  the 
privilege  of  imposing  a  heavy  duty  on  rags  shipped  thence  to  this 
country.  The  amount  of  duty  has  not  been  fixed  yet,  we  believe  ; 
but  there  are  fears  on  our  part  that  it  will  be  such  as  to  preclude 
either  paper  or  woolen  rags  being  brought  over  to  any  material  ex 
tent." 

The  fear  expressed  by  the  writer  was  well  founded. 
Shrewd  men  played  at  an  intricate  game  when  that  treaty 
was  made;  and  while  France  consented  far  enough  to  give 
a  text  upon  which  she  and  England  might  preach  free 
trade  to  the  other  nations  of  the  world,  she  reserved  to 
herself  the  amplest  power  to  maintain  the  most  perfect  de- 


PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN    LABOR.  45 

fensive  warfare  between  her  interests  and  those  of  aggres 
sive  England.* 

Prior  to  1844,  England  herself  subjected  rag-wool,  that 
is,  shoddy-wool  prepared  from  rags  by  any  other  nation,  to 
a  duty  of  a  half-penny  per  pound  ;  but  when  other  nations 
refused  to  sell  her  their  rags  in  bulk,  the  prepared  or  rag- 
wool  became  the  nearest  approach  she  could  obtain  in 
adequate  supply  to  that  species  of  raw  material,  and  she 
abolished  the  duty  which,  light  as  it  was,  favored  the  in 
dustry  of  her  rivals. 

Nor  is  Prussia  behind  France  and  England  in  this  mat 
ter,  for  the  same  pamphlet  tells  me  that  at  Berlin  there 
are  a  number  of  manufactories  of  rag-wool,  several  of 
which  have  been  established  by  enterprising  Englishmen 
from  the  shoddy  towns  of  Dewsbury  and  Batley. 

"These  factories,"  says  the  writer,  "produce  both  shoddy  and 
mungo,  and  appear  to  be  successful  undertakings.  The  principal 
reason  why  our  countrymen  prosecute  this  business  at  Berlin  and 
other  places  in  Prussia  is  because  that  Government  levies  a  heavy 
duty  on  the  exportation  of  rags,  and  permits  shoddy,  the  manufac 
tured  article,  to  go  out  free,  thus  affording  facilities  for  an  export 
trade  in  rag-wool  not  extended  to  rags." 

Insignificant  as  the  territory  of  Prussia  is  in  comparison 
with  ours,  the  Government  has  found  it  well  to  insist  upon 
Englishmen,  who  wish  to  work  the  raw  materials  of  the 
country,  coming  with  capital  and  machinery  to  furnish 
employment  to  its  men,  women,  and  children  with  the 
growth  of  the  land,  and  to  supply  agricultural  stimulants 
and  a  market  for  farm  products  within  its  limits,  rather 
than  repeat  the  unsuccessful  experiment  of  clothing  the 
people  in  foreign  goods  by  selling  their  raw  material  at  a 
price  fixed  by  a  distant  customer,  and  buying  it  back  in 
cloth  at  prices  fixed  by  the  same  party.  Will  the  Ame 
rican  people  never  learn  this  simple  lesson  ? 

SECRET  OF  BONAPARTE'S  POWER. 

The  first  Napoleon  said,  and  his  words  cannot  be  too 
often  repeated  in  a  republican  country,  a  majority  of  whose 
people  are  dependent  on  their  labor : 

"  In  feudal  times  there  was  one  kind  of  property — land  ;  but  there 
has  grown  up  another — industry.  They  are  alike  entitled  to  the 
protection  and  defense  of  the  Government." 

*The  French  were  merely  throwing  dirt  in  our  eyes  when  they  reduced  their 
ad  valorem  duties  from  50  or  30  to  15  per  cent,  on  articles  that  would  be  equally 
as  well  prohibited  by  an  ad  valorem  duty  of  5  per  cent.;  or  in  changing  total 
prohibition  for  a  30  per  cent,  ad  valorem  duty  on  articles  that  could  not  be  fold 
at  a  profit,  even  if  admitted  without  any  duty  at  all ;  yet  this  is  actually  what  ia 
done. — Sullivan  :  Protection  to  Native  Industry.  London,  1870.  Am.  Ed.  p.  65. 


46  PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR 

And  how  did  he  attempt  to  protect  and  defend  what 
was  and  ever  will  be  almost  the  only  property  and  de 
pendence  of  the  majority  of  the  people — their  skill  and 
industry?  Let  us  learn  from  Chaptal,  his  Minister  of  the 
Interior,  who,  in  his  work  on  the  Industry  of  France,  says  : 

"  A  sound  legislation  on  the  subject  of  duties  on  imports  is  the 
true  safeguard  of  agriculture  and  manufacturing  industry.  It  coun 
tervails  the  disadvantages  under  which  our  manufactures  labor  from 
the  condition  of  the  price  of  workmanship  or  fuel.  It  shields  the 
rising  arts  by  prohibitions,  thus  preserving  them  from  the  rivalship 
of  foreigners  until  they  arrive  at  complete  perfection.  It  tends  to 
establish  the  national  independence,  and  enriches  the  country  by 
useful  labor,  which,  as  I  have  repeatedly  said,  is  the  principal  source 

of  wealth It  has  been  almost  everywhere  found  that 

rising  manufactures  are  unable  to  struggle  against  establishments 
cemented  by  time,  nourished  by  numerous  capitals,  with  a  credit  es 
tablished  by  continued  success,  and  conducted  by  numbers  of  expe 
rienced  and  skilful  artists.  We  have  been  forced  to  have  recourse 
to  prohibition  to  ward  off  the  competition  of  foreign  productions. 
.  .  .  .  I  go  further:  even  at  the  present  time,  when  these  va 
rious  species  of  industry  are  in  a  flourishing  state,  when  there  is 
nothing  to  desire  with  regard  to  the  price  or  quality  of  our  produc 
tions,  a  duty  of  but  fifteen  per  cent.,  which  would  open  the  door  to 
the  competition  of  foreign  fabrics,  would  shake  to  their  foundations 
all  the  establishments  which  exist  in  France.  Our  stores  would  in 
a  few  days  be  crowded  with  foreign  merchandise,  which  wouldbesold 
at  any  price  in  order  to  extinguish  our  industry.  Our  manufacto 
ries  would  be  devoted  to  idleness  through  the  impossibility  of  the 
proprietors  making  the  same  sacrifices  as  foreigners  ;  and  we  should 
behold  the  same  scenes  as  followed  the  treaty  of  commerce  of  1786, 
although  it  was  concluded  on  the  basis  of  fifteen  per  cent.  .  .  . 

"  Cotton  yarn  forms  the  raw  material  of  our  numerous  laces  and 
calicoes.  If  we  freely  open  our  ports  to  this  material,  which  has 
undergone  but  a  single  operation,  behold  the  infallible  results.  One 
hundred  million  livres  at  present  production  would  be  destroyed  for 
the  spinning  manufactures  of  France,  because  it  is  invested  in  build 
ings,  utensils,  and  machinery,  constructed  for  this  purpose  alone; 
two  hundred  thousand  persons  would  be  deprived  of  employment ; 
eighteen  millions  of  manual  labor  would  be  lost  to  France,  and  our 
commerce  would  be  deprived  of  one  of  its  principal  resources,  which 
consists  in  the  transportation  of  cotton  and  wool  from  Asia  and 
America  to  France. 

•'  Let  it  not  be  presumed  that  I  deceive  myself.  I  am  well  ac 
quainted  with  the  state  of  our  cotton  spinning  and  that  of  the  two 
neighboring  countries.  In  France,  it  is  true,  manual  labor  is  cheap, 
but  on  the  other  side  more  extensive  establishments,  supported  by 
large  capitals,  afford  advantages  against  which  it  is  impossible  for  us 
as  yet  to  struggle.  To  this  must  be  added  that  the  English  spin 
ning  machinery  has  been  in  use  for  sixty  years,  that  the  proprietors 
are  indemnified  for  all  the  expenses  of  their  first  establishment,  that 
the  profits  have  been  converted  into  new  capitals,  whereas  ours  are 
of  recent  formation,  and  the  interest  of  the  first  investment  ought 
for  a  long  time  to  be  computed  in  all  the  calculations  of  the  profits 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  47 

of  the  manufactory.  The  English  manufacturer,  reimbursed  for  his 
first  investment,  and  possessing  a  large  capital,  is  able  to  make  sacri 
fices  to  overwhelm  and  level  us,  whereas  the  French  manufacturer  is 
destitute  of  defense  unless  protected  by  the  tariff." 

Chaptal  understood  as  thoroughly  as  Brougham  that 
England  had  the  power,  and  that  it  was  her  constant  policy 
to  "stifle  the  infant  manufactures"  of  other  nations  "in 
the  cradle."  His  language  is  as  applicable  to  our  interests 
now  as  it  was  to  those  of  France  when  uttered  ;  and  we 
can  find  no  other  safeguard  for  our  agricultural  arid  com 
mercial  interests  than  such  sound  legislation  on  the  sub 
ject  of  duties  on  imports  as  protected  the  infant  but  rising 
manufactures  of  France. 

I  cannot  abstain,  sir,  from  submitting  to  your  considera 
tion  in  this  connection  a  brief  specimen  of  vigorous  con 
densation  from  the  instructive  address  of  John  L.  Hayes, 
Esq.,  before  the  National  Association  of  Wool  Manufac 
turers  : 

"  No  sooner  had  the  First  Consul,  Bonaparte,  grasped  with  a  firm 
hand  the  reins  of  state,  than  he  resolved  to  develop  upon  the  French 
soil  all  the  elements  of  wealth  concealed  within  its  bosom.  He 
wished  to  appropriate  for  France  all  sciences,  arts,  and  industries. 
Made  a  member  of  the  Institute,  he  uttered  this  noble  sentiment : 
'  The  true  power  of  the  French  Republic  should  consist,  above  all,  in 
its  not  allowing  a  single  new  idea  to  exist  which  it  does  not  make  its 
own.'  To  learn  the  necessities  and  resources  of  the  nation,  he  called 
upon  savans,  painters,  and  artisans  to  adorn  with  their  productions 
the  vast  hall  of  the  Louvre.  From  this  epoch  a  new  career  was 
opened  to  the  industry  of  France,  which  found  its  most  magnificent 
protector  in  the  chief  of  the  State.  Napoleon  said :  '  Spain  has 
twenty-five  million  merinos ;  I  wish  France  to  have  a  hundred  mil 
lions.'  To  effect  this,  among  other  administrative  aids,  he  estab 
lished  sixty  additional  sheep-folds  to  those  of  Rambouillet,  where 
agriculturists  could  obtain  the  use  of  Spanish  rams  without  expense. 
By  the  continental  blockade  he  closed  France  arid  the  greater  part 
of  Europe  against  English  importations  ;  and  the  manufacturers  of 
France  were  pushed  to  their  utmost  to  supply,  not  only  their  domes 
tic,  but  European  consumption.  They  had  to  replace,  by  imitating 
them,  the  English  commodities  to  which  the  people  had  been  so 
long  accustomed.  The  old  routines  of  manufacturing  were  aban 
doned,  and  the  reign  of  the  Emperor  became,  in  all  the  industrial  arts, 
one  long  series  of  discoveries  and  progress.  Napoleon  saw  that  the  con 
quest  of  the  industry  of  England  was  no  less  important  than  the  de 
struction  of  its  fleets  and  armies.  He  appealed  to  patriotism,  as 
well  as  science  and  the  arts,  to  aid  him  in  his  strife  with  the  modern 
Carthage.  Visiting  the  establishment  for  printing  calicoes  of  the 
celebrated  Oberhampf.  Napoleon  said  to  him,  as  he  saw  the  perfec 
tion  of  the  fabrics  :  'We  are  both  of  us  carrying  on  a  war  with  P]ng- 
land  ;  but  I  think  that  yours,  after  all,  is  the  best.'  '  These  words,' 
says  M.  Randoing,  'so  nattering  and  so  just,  were  repeated  from  one 
end  of  France  to  the  other  ;  they  so  inflamed  the  imaginations  of  the 


48  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

people  that  the  meanest  artisan,  believing  himself  called  upon  to  be 
the  auxiliary  of  the  great  man,  had  but  one  thought,  the  ruin  of 
England.'  " 

WHAT   PROTECTION   HAS    DONE    FOR    GERMANY. 

Before  the  establishment  of  the  Zoll-Verein,  which  oc 
curred  in  1835,  Germany  exported  raw  materials.  Hav 
ing  sold  her  skins  for  a  six-pence,  she  bought  back  what 
few  tails  she  could  at  any  price.  Her  laboring  people 
were  poor,  and,  as  is  now  the  case  in  Ireland,  in  such  ex 
cess  of  her  ability  to  feed  and  clothe  them,  that  she  was 
ever  ready  to  sell  a  contingent  to  any  party  that  might  be 
engaged  in  war,  and,  if  need  be,  to  swell  the  ranks  of  both 
contending  armies.  In  the  absence  of  protective  duties, 
there  was  nothing  of  so  little  value  to  her  as  an  able-bodied 
German  peasant.  Bat  the  establishment  of  that  Customs- 
Union  has  changed  all  this.  It  protects  her  industry,  and 
as  a  consequence  she  imports  raw  materials  from  America 
and  all  other  countries  that  adhere  to  her  ancient  semi- 
barbarous  policy,  and  exports  her  grain  and  wool  con 
densed  into  broadcloth  and  the  multiform  products  of  well- 
protected  industry.  The  annual  crop  derived  from  her 
soil  increases  per  acre  steadily  as  that  of  England,  and  in 
about  the  ratio  of  the  diminution  of  ours.  Wise  laws 
have  here  again  demonstrated  the  truth  that  there  is  a 
harmony  between  the  varied  interests  of  the  people  of  a 
country,  and  that  by  a  wide  and  universal  diversification 
of  employments  the  welfare  of  each  and  all  is  advanced. 

Forty  years  ago  England  had  not  perfected  her  protec 
tive  system  so  far  as  to  admit  all  raw  materials  free  of 
duty,  and  Germany  sold  her  thirty  million  pounds  of  raw 
wool,  upon  which  she  collected  a  duty  of  twelve  cents  a 
pound,  part  of  which,  when  manufactured  into  low  grades 
of  cloth,  she  sold  at  immense  profits  in  Germany.  But 
thirty  years  of  protection  have  changed  all  this.  Germany 
now  raises  over  one  hundred  million  pounds  of  wool,  and 
imports  very  considerable  quantities;  and  having  com 
pacted  her  grain  and  wool  into  fine  cloths,  she  exports 
them  to  all  parts  of  the  world.  When  the  Zoll-Verein 
was  formed,  says  Henry  C.  Carey  :* 

*  Slave  Trade,  Domestic  and  Foreign,  p.  310.  This  invaluable  work  does  not, 
as  its  title  implies,  relate  specially  or  mainly  to  chattel  slavery.  It  is  the  illus 
tration  of  the  correctness  of  Mr.  Carey's  opinions  drawn  from  the  history  and 
condition  of  many  countries.  If  it  be  true  that  "  history  is  philosophy  teaching 
by  example,"  its  author  should  take  a  high  plnce  among  historians.  Carey's 
Slave  Trade,  Domestic  and  Foreign,  should  receive  the  consideration  of  every 
candid  student  of  social  science,  and  no  library  is  complete  in  this  department 
without  it. 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  49 

"  The  total  import  of  raw  cotton  and  cotton  yarn  was  about  three 
hundred  thousand  cwts  ;  but  so  rapid  was  the  extension  of  the  manufac 
ture  that  in  less  than  six  years  it  had  doubled ;  and  so  cheaply  were 
cotton  goods  supplied  that  a  large  export  trade  had  already  arisen. 
In  1845,  when  the  Union  was  but  ten  years  old,  the  import  of  cotton 
and  yarn  had  reached  a  million  of  hundred  weights,  and  since  that 
time  there  lias  been  a  large  increase.  The  iron  manufacture  also 
grew  so  rapidly  that  whereas,  in  1834,  the  consumption  had  been 
only  eleven  pounds  per  head ;  in  1847  it  had  risen  to  twenty-five 
pounds,  having  thus  more  than  doubled  ;  and  with  each  step  in  this 
direction,  the  people  were  obtaining  better  machinery  for  cultivating 
the  land  and  for  converting  its  raw  products  into  manufactured 
ones."* 

WASHINGTON,  JEFFERSON,  AND  JACKSON. 
In  what  strange  contrast  with  this  policy,  so  fruitful  of 
blessings,  has  been  that  which  we  have  pursued,  and  of  which 
the  gentleman  from  Indiana  claims  President  Johnson  as 
an  adherent.  Opposed  to  privileged  classes  we  have  legis 
lated  in  the  interests  of  but  one  class,  and  that  an  oligar 
chy  ;  proclaiming  "  the  greatest  good  of  the  greatest  num 
ber  "  as  our  supreme  desire,  we  have  so  legislated  as  to 
impair  the  value  of  labor,  the  only  property  of  a  majority 
of  our  people ;  vaunting  our  national  independence,  we 
have  so  legislated  as  to  prevent  our  escape  from  a  condi 
tion  of  commercial,  manufacturing,  and  financial  depend 
ence;  and  while  justly  proud  of  our  general  intelligence, 
we  have  so  legislated  as  to  justify  the  manufacturing  and 
commercial  nations  of  the  world  in  classing  us  among  the 
semi-barbarous  governments,  whose  people,  rich  in  natural 
wealth,  have  not  the  capacity  to  mould  and  transmute  raw 
materials  into  articles  of  utility,  comfort,  and  refinement, 
and  in  ranking  the  people  of  the  United  States,  in  their 
estimation,  with  those  of  Turkey,  Portugal,  Ireland,  and 
the  mixed  races  of  Central  and  South  America.  The 
fathers  of  the  country  were,  in  this  matter,  wiser  than  their 
children.  They  had  suffered  from  the  rigid  enforcement 
by  Great  Britain  of  Andrew  Gee's  suggestion  to  "  keep  a 
watchful  eye  over  our  colonies,  and  restrain  them  from 
setting  up  any  of  the  manufactures  which  are  carried  on 
in  Great  Britain;"  and  they  knew  that  if  the  nation  they 
had  founded  was  to  be  powerful,  and  its  people  prosperous, 
they  must  be  relieved  from  that  policy  by  the  only  means 
possible — the  adherence  to  those  defensive  laws  which 

*  The  largest  and  most  successful  iron  and  steel  establishment  in  the  world  is 
not  in  England.  It  is  Krupp's,  at  Essen,  Prussia.  Its  protected  ware?  compete 
with  those  of  England  in  every  country. 

4 


50  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

would  protect  an  infant  against  the  aggressions  of  a  giant. 
The  Constitution  was  adopted  in  1787 ;  President  Wash 
ington  was  inaugurated  in  1789,  and  in  his  address  of  the 
8th  of  January,  1790,  said : 

"  The  safety  and  interest  of  the  people  require  that  they  should 
"remote  such  manufactures  as  tend  to  render  them  independent  of 
thers  for  essential,  particularly  for  military  supplies." 

And  on  the  15th  of  the  same  month,  Congress  resolved — • 

"  That  it  be  referred  to  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  to  propose 
and  report  to  this  House  a  proper  plan  or  plans  conformably  to  the 
recommendations  of  the  President  in  his  speech  to  both  Houses  of 
Congress,  for  the  encouragement  and  promotion  of  such  manufac 
tures  as  will  tend  to  render  the  United  States  independent  of  other 
nations  for  essential,  particularly  for  military  supplies." 

And  in  1791  Congress  adopted  an  Act  for  imposing 
duties  on  imports,  the  preamble  of  which  contains  the 
following  language : 

"  Whereas  it  is  necessary  for  the  support  of  the  Government,  for 
the  discharge  of  the  debts  of  the  United  States,  and  the  encourage 
ment  and  protection  of  manufactures,  that  duties  be  laid  on  goods, 
wares,  and  merchandise  imported." 

In  a  communication  five  years  later  than  this.  Washing 
ton  said : 

"  Congress  have  repeatedly  directed  their  attention  to  the  encour 
agement  of  manufactures.  The  object  is  of  too  much  importance 
not  to  insure  a  continuance  of  these  efforts  in  every  way  which  shall 
appear  eligible." 

And  Mr.  Jefferson,  in  his  message  of  1802,  said  that — 

"  To  cultivate  peace,  maintain  commerce  and  navigation,  to  foster 
our  fisheries,  and  protect  manufactures  adapted  to  our  circumstances, 
etc.,  are  the  land-marks  by  which  to  guide  ourselves  in  all  our  rela 
tions." 

These  expressions  are  inconsistent  with  the  opinions 
adverse  to  the  policy  of  fostering  manufacturers  in  this 
country  embodied  by  Jefferson  in  his  Notes  on  Virginia 
in  1785 ;  but  he  was  not  one  of  those  fools  who  hold  it  a 
weakness  to  change  an  opinion,  even  under  the  discipline 
of  experience ;  and  in  a  letter  to  Mr.  Benjamin  Austin, 
dated  January  9,  1816,  when  the  subject  of  a  protective 
tariff  was  agitated  by  the  people  and  was  about  to  be 
brought  to  the  attention  of  Congress,  said  in  support  of  his 
matured  judgment : 

"You  tell  me  I  am  quoted  by  those  who  wish  to  continue 
our  dependence  on  England  for  manufactures.  There  was  a  time 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  51 

when  I  might  have  been  so  quoted  with  more  candor  ....  "We 
have  since  experienced  what  we  did  not  then  believe,  that  there 
exists  both  profligacy  and  power  enough  to  exclude  us  from  the 
field  of  interchange  with  other  nations — that  to  be  independent  for 
the  comforts  of  life,  we  must  fabricate  them  ourselves.  We  must 
now  place  the  manufacturer  by  the  side  of  the  agriculturist. 

He,  therefore,  who  is  now  against  domestic  manufactures 
must  be  for  reducing  us  either  to  dependence  on  that  foreign  nation, 
or  to  be  clothed  in  skins  arid  to  live  like  wild  beasts  in  dens  and 
caverns.  I  am  proud  to  say  that  I  am  not  one  of  these.  Exper 
ience  has  taught  me  that  manufactures  are  now  as  necessary  to  our 
independence  as  to  our  comfort;  arid  if  those  who  quote  me  as  of  a 
different  opinion  will  keep  pace  with  me  in  purchasing  nothing  foreign 
where  an  equivalent  of  domestic  fabric  can  be  obtained,  without  any 
regard  to  difference  of  price,  it  will  not  be  our  fault  if  we  do  not  have 
a  supply  at  home  equal  to  our  demand,  and  wrest  that  weapon  of 
distress  from  the  hand  which  has  so  long  wantonly  violated  it." 

General  Jackson's  oft-quoted  letter  to  Dr.  Coleman,  of 
North  Carolina,  was  about  eight  years  later  than  that  of 
Mr.  Jefferson,  and  nothing  that  he  ever  wrote  illustrates 
more  admirably  his  strong  common  sense  and  devotion  to 
the  rights  and  interests  of  all  the  people  of  the  Union 
which  he  so  resolutely  defended.  Writing  to  one  of  that 
class  who  have  been  pleased  to  call  themselves  "  planters," 
to  distinguish  them  from  the  "  hard-fisted  farmers  "  of  the 
North,  upon  whose  interests  they  were  then  waging  war, 
that  they  might  secure  cheap  food  for  their  slaves,  he  said : 

"  I  will  ask,  what  is  the  real  situation  of  the  agriculturist  ?  Where 
has  the  American  farmer  a  market  for  his  surplus  products? 
Except  for  cotton,  he  has  neither  a  foreign  nor  a  home  market. 
Does  not  this  clearly  prove,  when  there  is  no  market,  either  at  home 
or  abroad,  that  there  is  too  much  labor  employed  in  agriculture, 
and  that  the  channels  of  labor  should  be  multiplied?  Common 
sense  points  out  at  once  the  remedy.  Draw  from  agriculture  the 
superabundant  labor;  employ  it  in  mechanism  and  manufactures, 
thereby  creating  a  home  market  for  your  breadstuffs,  and  distribut 
ing  labor  to  a  most  profitable  account ;  and  benefits  to  the  country 
will  result.  Take  from  agriculture  in  the  United  States  six  hundred 
thousand  men,  women,  and  children,  and  you  at  once  give  a  home 
market  for  more  breadstuffs  than  all  Europe  now  furnishes  us.  In 
short,  sir,  we  have  been  too  long  subject  to  the  policy  of  the  British 
merchants.  It  is  time  we  should  become  a  little  more  Americanized, 
and  instead  of  feeding  the  paupers  and  laborers  of  Europe,  feed  our 
own ;  or  else,  in  a  short  time,  by  continuing  our  present  policy,  we 
shall  all  be  paupers  ourselves." 

MAX   CANNOT   COMPROMISE   PRINCIPLES. 

Mr.  Chairman,  why  have  we  not  regarded  the  teachings 
of  history,  the  monitions  of  the  fathers,  the  oft-recurring 
and  bitter  experience  of  the  past?  Why  have  we  been 


52  PKOTECTIOISr   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR. 

content,  to  find  the  mass  of  artisans  and  artificers  of  the  coun 
try,  at  intervals  of  from  seven  to  ten  years,  without  employ 
ment,  drawing  from  the  savings  bank  their  hoarded  earn 
ings,  seeing  the  little  homes,  under  the  roofs  of  which  they 
had  hoped  in  ripe  age  to  die,  passing  under  the  sheriff's 
hammer;  and  to  see  the  forge,  the  furnace,  the  mill,  and 
the  workshop  idle,  and  changing  hands  by  forced  sale 
oftentimes  at  less  than  a  fourth,  and  sometimes  at  but  a 
tithe  of  their  original  cost?  Why  have  we  been  content 
to  see  the  crop  of  the  farmer  rot  in  the  field,  while  the 
laboring  people  of  the  cities  were  gnawed  by  hunger,  and 
causing  doubts  of  the  stability  of  republican  institutions 
by  threatening,  and  in  at  least  one  instance  absolutely  per 
petrating,  bread  riots  ?  Why  has  our  march  of  emigra 
tion  been  a  march  of  desolation,  and  the  son  of  him  who 
emigrated  to  Ohio  as  the  far  West,  finding  his  labor  unre 
warded  by  the  famished  land,  been  constrained  to  cry 
"  Westward  ho!"  and  go  to  contend  with  the  trials  and 
deprivations  of  frontier  life,  and  found  a  new  State  still 
more -remote  from  markets  ? 

And  why  was  it,  sir,  that  when  those  who  would  over 
throw  our  Government  fired  upon  the  flag,  that,  with  our 
unequaled  ingenuity,  our  sheep  walks  of  limitless  extent, 
our  boundless  water  power,  and  our  measureless  stores  of 
coal  and  iron,  we  were  unable  to  provide  adequate  clothing 
and  arms  for  the  seventy-five  thousand  men  summoned  to 
our  defense  ?  There  is  but  one  answer  to  all  these  questions. 
We  suffered  all  these  ills  because  we  had  disregarded  the 
laws  I  am  endeavoring  to  illustrate  and  other  fundamental 
truths  in  which,  on  every  public  occasion,  we  proclaim  our 
belief;  had  endeavored  to  maintain  in  this  free  and  busy 
age  an  anachronism,  involving  the  denial  of  all  rights,  and 
the  repression  of  the  native  ability  of  the  laborers  of  one 
half  of  our  country ;  and  had  endeavored  to  prove  the 
solecism  that  slavery  is  an  essential  element  of  free  institu 
tions,  and  adds  to  the  power  of  a  country  contending  for 
supremacy  with  nations  that  are  using  every  expedient  to 
animate  the  industry,  ingenuity,  and  enterprise  of  their  peo 
ple.  By  oppressing  others  we  enfeebled  and  degraded 
ourselves.  Slavery  has  its  laws,  and  they  are  irreconcil 
able  with  those  which  quicken  industry  and  develop 
material  power.  Time  will  not  permit,  nor  is  this  the 
occasion  for  their  discussion.  It  is  enough  for  the  present 
to  say  that  they  do  not  tolerate  intelligent  or  requited 


PROTECTION"   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  53 

labor.  They  were  understood  and  enforced  by  the  slave- 
owning  oligarchy,  and  were  submitted  to  by  the  masses 
of  the  people,  whose  artfully  fostered  pride  of  race  de 
luded  them  into  the  belief  that  the  inequalities  of  caste  were 
consistent  with  the  democracy  of  a  professedly  Christian 
republic.  At  last  the  delusion  is  dispelled,  and  with  it  go 
the  cruel  necessities  by  which  those  who,  being  freemen, 
were,  under  the  compromises  of  the  Constitution,  enslaved 
by  the  inherent  laws  of  slavery ;  and  our  country  having 
corrected  the  solecism  and  banished  the  anachronism,  may 
now  enter  upon  a  career  of  competition  with  the  most 
advanced  nations  of  the  world.  The  vast  and  varied 
attractions  the  United  States  present  to  the  hopeful,  the 
enterprising,  ingenious  and  skilled  workmen  of  the  world, 
are  the  means  by  which  we  may  enfeeble  all  rival  Powers, 
while  building  up  our  own,  and  augmenting  the  prosper 
ity  of  our  rapidly-increasing  people.  Slavery  being  dead, 
let  us  entomb  with  it  its  twin  barbarism,  British  free  trade. 
Henceforth  our  legislation  may  well  be  directed  to 
advancing  the  greatest  good  not  only  of  the  greatest  num 
ber,  but  the  unquestioned  good  of  all;  and  in  this  it  will 
stand  in  strange  contrast  with  its  purposes  and  policy  in  the 
past.  To  show  how  wide  that  contrast  will  be,  let  me  turn 
again  to  King  Cotton.  On  page  96  of  this  royal  volume  I 
find  it  written : 

"At  the  date  of  the  passage  of  the  Nebraska  bill,  the  multiplica 
tion  of  provisions  by  their  more  extended  cultivation,  was  the  only 
measure  left  that  could  produce  a  reduction  of  prices  and  meet  the 
wants  of  the  planters.  The  Canadian  reciprocity  treaty,  since  se 
cured,  will  bring  the  products  of  the  British  North  American  colonies, 
free  of  duty,  into  competition  with  those  of  the  United  States  when 
prices  with  us  rule  high." 

This  was  not  written  by  an  English  hand. 

Our  forges,  furnaces,  and  factories  were  unprofitable 
capital.  Coal,  ore,  and  limestone  lay  undisturbed  in  the 
places  of  their  original  deposit,  and  mechanics  of  skill  and 
energy  went  begging  for  employment.  Yet  an  American 
writer  rejoiced  that  the  means  had  been  secured  by  which 
the  farmers  of  the  country  could  be  made  to  suffer  with 
the  afflicted  multitude.  With  that  want  of  patriotism 
which  has  long  characterized  the  leaders  of  the  Demo 
cratic  party,  he  exulted  over  the  subjection  of  the  agri 
cultural  interests  of  his  country  to  those  of  British  North 
America  by  that  misnamed  reciprocity  treaty  with  Canada 


54:  PROTECTION    TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

which  southern  influence  had  forced  upon  us,  and  lauded 
it  as  the  sure  means  by  which  the  farmer  should  be  driven 
to  a  still  greater  distance  from  all  other  markets  than  that 
afforded  by  the  few  hundred  thousand  men  who  regarded 
no  interests  but  their  own,  and  believed  that  these  could 
only  be  promoted  by  procuring  still  cheaper  food  for  their 
millions  of  slaves. 

But  listen  to  him  again.  On  page  123  I  find  the  follow 
ing  : 

"  From  what  has  been  said,  the  dullest  intellect  cannot  fail  now  to 
perceive  the  rationale  of  the  Kansas-Nebraska  movement.  The 
political  influence  which  these  Territories  will  give  to  the  South  will 
be  of  the  first  importance  to  perfect  its  arrangement  for  future 
slavery  extension,  whether  by  division  of  the  larger  States  and 
Territories  now  secured  to  the  institution,  its  extension  into  territory 
hitherto  considered  free,  or  the  acquisition  of  new  territory  to  be 
devoted  to  the  system,  so  as  to  preserve  the  balance  of  power  in 
Congress.  When  this  is  done,  Kansas  and  Nebraska,  like  Kentucky 
and  Missouri,  will  be  of  little  consequence  to  slaveholders  compared 
with  the  cheap  and  constant  supply  of  provisions  they  can  yield. 
Nothing,  therefore,  will  so  exactly  coincide  with  southern  interests  as 
a  rapid  emigration  of  freemen  into  these  new  Territories,  White  free 
labor,  doubly  productive  over  slave  labor  in  grain-growing,  must  be 
multiplied  within  their  limits,  that  the  cost  of  provisions  may  be  re 
duced,  and  the  extension  of  slavery  and  the  growth  of  cotton  suffer 
no  interruption.  The  present  efforts  to  plant  them  with  slavery  are 
indispensable  to  produce  sufficient  excitement  to  fill  them  speedily 
with  a  free  population ;  and  if  this  whole  movement  has  been  a 
southern  scheme  to  cheapen  provisions  and  increase  the  ratio  of  the 
production  of  sugar  and  cotton,  as  it  most  unquestionably  will  do, 
it  surpasses  the  statesmanlike  strategy  which  forced  the  people  into 
an  acquiescence  in  the  annexation  of  Texas.  Arid  should  the  anti- 
slavery  voters  succeed  in  gaining  the  political  ascendency  in  these 
Territories,  and  bring  them  as  free  States  triumphantly  into  the 
Union,  what  can  they  do  but  turn  in  as  all  the  rest  of  the  western 
States  have  done,  and  help  to  feed  slaves,  or  those  who  manufacture 
or  sell  the  products  of  the  labor  of  slaves  ?  " 

These  paragraphs  show  that  the  slaveholders  achieved 
what  an  examination  of  the  topography  of  the  country 
might  have  led  them  to  regard  as  a  last  grand  triumph 
Their  system  held  undisputed  sway ;  and  let  me  ask 
whether,  had  they  been  content  to  live  under  the  Govern 
ment  that  existed,  it  could  have  prospered  long?  Two 
interests  alone  were  to  be  pursued:  the  growing  of  grain 
in  the  North  and  West,  and  the  growing  of  cotton,  sugar, 
rice,  tobacco,  and  hemp  in  the  South.  In  the  light  of  the 
extracts,  showing  the  rapid  exhaustion  of  our  soil  by  the 
exportation  of  its  products,  which  I  presented  in  the  earlier 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN    LABOR.  55 

part  of  my  remarks,  and  of  the  experience  of  every  far 
mer  and  planter,  will  it  be  asserted  that  this  system  of 
culture  could  long  have  continued?  Science  could  have 
calculated  the  years  of  its  possible  duration  with  almost 
perfect  accuracy.  When,  under  such  a  system,  could  the 
earth  have  rest  for  recuperation  ?  And  whence  could 
come  the  stimulants  to  restore  its  wasted  energies?  The 
system  omitted  these  essential  conditions  of  prosperity, 
and  thereby  provided  for  its  own  decline.  The  scheme  was 
an  impracticable  one,  which  though  it  might  have  served 
as  a  temporary  expedient,  could  not  endure,  for  it  was  in 
conflict  with  the  laws  of  Providence. 

It  may  be  that  an  indistinct  perception  of  this  drove 
the  oligarchy  to  the  madness  of  war;  for  all  now  admit 
that  there  was  not,  in  the  election  of  Mr.  Lincoln,  or  the 
purposes  of  the  Republican  party,  anything  to  justify  their 
attempt  to  destroy  the  Union  by  war.  But  be  this  as  it 
may,  the  war  did  but  hasten,  by  a  few  years,  the  inevitable 
termination  of  their  persistent  folly  and  crime.  The  com 
mercial  crisis  of  1860,  following  so  closely  upon  that  of 
1857,  and  repeating,  as  both  did  so  minutely,  in  all  their 
details,  the  disastrous  and  wide-spread  incidents  of  1837 
and  1810,  would  in  themselves  have  constrained  the  people 
to  demand  such  legislation  as  would  promote  and  secure  a 
diversification  of  our  industries,  the  development  of  our 
resources,  and  the  laying  of  foundations  for  a  widely-ex 
tended  commerce.  The  American  people  had  become  too 
numerous,  too  enlightened,  too  energetic,  and  had  endured 
too  many  of  these  commercial  crises  to  have  been  willing 
longer  to  submit  their  fortunes  and  destinies  to  the  control 
of  the  few  arrogant  theorists,  whose  views  were  so  narrow 
and  whose  fancied  interests  were  so  diametrically  opposed 
to  those  of  all  the  rest  of  their  countrymen. 

THEN  AND  NOW. 

Sir,  let  us  contemplate  for  a  moment  our  condition  when 
the  champions  of  slavery  and  free  trade  fired  on  the  flag 
of  the  country.  April,  1861,  found  us  unable  to  clothe 
our  soldiers  or  furnish  them  with  implements  and  muni 
tions  of  war.  When  the  President  called  for  seventy-five 
thousand  troops,  and  that  number  of  the  flower  of  our 
countrymen  promptly  responded,  they  were  clad,  not  in 
our  blue  alone,  but  in  gray,  the  chosen  color  of  our  enemy, 
in  black,  in  red,  or  any  other  color,  because  we  had  not 


56  PROTECTION    TO    AMERICAN    LABOR. 

the  proper  material  with  which  to  clothe  them.  We  had 
not  the  quality  of  iron  from  which  to  fashion  a  gun  barrel, 
nor  could  we  make  it.  We  had  not  blankets  to  shield  our 
men  from  rain  or  frost,  in  camp  or  bivouac;  and  as  the 
people  regarded  the  base  character  of  the  articles  with 
which  our  army  was  provided,  many  of  which  had  been 
made  from  American  rags  in  the  shoddy  towns  of  York 
shire,  they  raised  a  universal  cry  of  "  fraud  "  against  both 
public  officers  and  contractors.  Our  mills,  forges,  furnaces, 
and  factories  stood  still.  The  frugal  laborer  was  living 
upon  the  earnings  of  past  years.  Commerce,  having 
dwindled  from  the  expiration  of  the  protective  tariff  of 
1812,  had  ceased  to  animate  our  ports.  The  crops  of  the 
West  stood  ungathered  in  the  fields,  and  the  bankruptcy 
of  1857,  from  which  we  had  not  yet  recovered,  had 
returned  to  sweep  away  the  few  who  had  withstood 
the  surge. 

But  the  case  is  altered  now.  Necessity  has  compelled 
us  to  do  what  reason  and  experience  long  ago  suggested. 
The  fact  that  we  determined  to  pay  in  gold  the  interest  on 
our  bonds  and  to  obtain  the  required  bullion  by  collecting 
the  duties  on  imports  in  coin,  has  done  much  to  animate 
and  diversify  our  industry.  This  fact  and  the  general 
results  of  the  war* — for  the  duties  we  lay  on  raw  materials 
and  our  internal  taxes  more  than  counterbalance  the  pro 
tection  afforded  to  many  branches  of  industry  by  our  tariff 
laws — have  enabled  us  to  recover  from  our  prostration  and 
started  us  in  a  career  of  prosperity  and  progress ;  and  if 
wisdom  guide  our  legislation,  the  waste  lands  of  which  I 
have  read  will  soon  be  reinvigorated  ;  the  ancient  village 
will  be  absorbed  in  the  expanding  city;  new  towns  will 
mark  the  plain  and  river  bank ;  and  where  the  mean  white 
and  the  negro  have  loitered  listlessly  through  the  months, 
diversified  and  well-paid  industry,  quickening  their  ener 
gies  and  expanding  their  desires,  will  employ  all  their  hours, 
and  enable  each  to  carve  his  way  as  an  American  citizen 
should  do  in  a  career  that  will  afford  him  pleasure  or  profit. 
The  gentleman  from  Indiana  may  desire  to  recall  the  idle 
ness  and  misery  of  1860,  but  I  cannot  believe  that  he  is 
justified  in  intimating  that  President  Johnson  sympathizes 
with  him  in  this  respect. 


*  The  most  immediate  and  beneficent  of  which  was  the  volume  of  currency 
created  by  the  issue  of  greenbacks. 


PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN    LABOR.  57 

VIRGINIA. 

General  Frank  P.  Blair,  jr.,  intent  upon  neutralizing 
any  service  he  may  have  rendered  the  country  during  the 
war,  having  gathered  about  him  the  representative  men 
of  the  eighty  thousand  disfranchised  traitors  of  Missouri 
with  whom  he  now  affiliates,  recently  charged,  as  does 
the  gentleman  from  Indiana,  that  the  Republican  party  of 
the  country  is  under  the  control  of  men  whose  object  is  to 
aggrandize  New  England,  and  by  a  protective  tariff  tax 
the  agricultural  interests  of  the  country  for  the  benefit  of 
a  few  wealthy  manufacturers,  and  that  the  resistance 
offered  to  the  admission  of  representatives  of  the  con 
quered  but  unregenerated  people  of  the  South  by  Congress 
is  the  result  of  this  purpose.  How  false  this  is  he  well 
knows ;  for  everv  member  of  the  family  in  the  councils 
of  which  he  bears  so  distinguished  a  part,  and  which 
always  speaks  as  a  unit,  may  be  shown,  by  their  published 
utterances,  to  understand  that  protection  to  American 
industry  is  essential  to  the  prosperity  of  the  agricultural 
interests  of  the  country.  Adequate  protection  to  Ameri 
can  industry,  its  defense  against  the  assaults  of  the  accu 
mulated  capital,  machinery,  cheap  labor,  and  skill  of 
foreign  countries,  is  of  less  importance  to  the  middle  and 
New  England  States  than  to  any  other  portion  of  the 
country.  The  wasted  South  most  needs  it ;  and  next  to 
the  South,  the  Northwest,  rich  in  all  the  elements  of  man 
ufacturing  greatness,  and  poor  only  from  her  want  of  local 
markets,  which  the  diversification  of  her  industry  arid 
developement  of  her  multifarious  resources  would  create. 

Sir,  Virginia  is  not  a  New  England  State  ;  nor  do  her 
people  delight  in  being  called  Yankees,  though  they  will 
hereafter  be  as  proud  as  we  are  of  our  national  cognomen. 
But  no  portion  of  our  country,  unless  it  be  General  Blair's 
own  Missouri,  with  her  boundless  stores  of  varied  mineral 
wealth,  would  be  so  blessed  by  setting  all  its  poor  at  work 
upon  the  growth  of  its  own  lands  as  Virginia.  A  discrimi 
nating  writer,  who  in  August  last  traversed  a  large  portion 
of  the  gold  region  of  the  State,  in  company  with  three 
eminent  mineralogists,  in  the  course  of  an  article  in  the 
December  number  of  Harper's  Magazine,  says : 

"To  give  any  adequate  description  of  the  mineral  wealth  which 
Virginia  contains,  would  be  not  only  to  minutely  describe  every 
rod  of  her  entire  length,  embracing  hundreds  of  miles,  but  to  enu 
merate  almost  every  mineral  of  value  hitherto  known  among  man- 


58  PROTECTION"   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

kind.  It  is  not  in  gold  alone  that  she  abounds — hut,  scattered  in 
profusion  over  almost  her  entire  surface  are  to  be  found  iron,  copper, 
silver,  tin,  tellurium,  lead,  platinum,  cinnabar,  plumbago,  manganese, 
asbestos,  kaolin,  slate,  clay,  coal,  roofing  slate  of  the  greatest  dura 
bility,  marbles  of  the  rarest  beauty,  soap  stone,  sulphur,  hone-stone, 
equal  to  the  best  Turkey,  gypsum,  lime,  copperas,  blue  stone,  grind 
stone,  cobalt,  emery,  and  a  variety  of  other  materials  that  we  have 
hitherto  been  compelled  to  import  or  to  do  without.  Indeed,  it  may 
be  said,  without  exaggeration,  that  in  the  single  State  of  Virginia,  in 
the  most  singular  juxtaposition  of  what  might  be  considered  geolog 
ically  incongruous  materials,  is  to  be  found  an  almost  exhaust- 
less  fund  of  God-given  treasures,  more  than  enough  to  pay  off  our 
whole  national  debt,  and  only  awaiting  the  magic  touch  of  capital 
and  enterprise  to  drag  them  to  light  for  the  benefit  of  man." 

Of  what  avail  have  these  boundless  deposits  of  multi 
form  riches  been  to  the  people  of  Virginia,  and  what  have 
the  Democratic  party,  slavery,  and  British  free  trade  done 
for  their  most  fortunately  situated  and  devoted  adherents  ? 
The  aristocracy  of  Virginia  have  withheld  from  the  laborer 
his  hire,  and  the  native  fertility  of  their  land  has  wasted  away. 
They  have  traded  in  human  muscles  as  a  source  of  power, 
and  laboring  men  have  shunned  their  inviting  climate ; 
and  their  water  power,  exceeding  in  one  year  the  muscular 
power  that  all  the  slaves  found  in  the  United  States  at  the 
taking  of  the  last  census  could  put  forth  in  a  lifetime,  has 
flowed  idly  to  the  sea,  often  through  forests  so  wide  that 
it  could  "  hear  no  sound  save  its  own  dashing."  And  the 
State,  from  having  at  the  close  of  the  last  century  been 
the  first  in  point  of  population  and  political  power,  fell,  in 
sixty  years,  as  is  shown  by  the  census  of  1860,  to  be  the 
fifth  in  population,  and  to  rank  the  equal  of  free  young 
Indiana  in  the  fifth  class  in  political  power. 

The  laws  of  Providence  are  inflexible,  and  it  could  not 
be  otherwise.  Despising  labor,  the  Heaven-appointed 
condition  on  which  alone  man  shall  eat  bread,  she  tended 
year  by  year  toward  poverty  and  want,  and  though  she 
raised  millions  of  laboring  people  of  every  shade  of  hu 
man  complexion,  the  sweat  of  their  brows  enriched  not  her 
fields  but  those  of  other  states.  Like  Germany  before 
the  establishment  of  the  Zoll-Verein,  and  Ireland  since  the 
Union,  she  raised  little  else  than  labouring  people  for 
exportation.  If  he  who  fails  to  provide  for  his  family  be 
worse  than  an  infidel,  what  shall  be  said  of  the  legislation 
that  drives  the  heirs  to  so  goodly  a  heritage  as  the  lands 
of  Virginia  forth  in  want  and  ignorance  to  dwell  among 
strangers  ? 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  59 

The  Republicans  of  New  England  and  the  Middle  States 
would  make  all  her  people  comfortable,  happy,  and  intel 
ligent,  in  the  homes  of  their  fathers.  We  of  Pennsylva 
nia  will  welcome  them  to  generous  rivalry  in  every  branch 
of  industry  to  which  we  have  devoted  ourselves.  In  this 
age  of  iron,  fire  is  force,  and  Virginia  is  underlaid  by 
the  purest  fuel.  If  she  wishes  to  leave  her  rich  gold 
and  silver  mines  in  all  their  wealth  to  posterity,  let 
her  rival  us  in  contributing  to  the  needed  supply  of 
iron  and  steel  for  the  exhausted  South.  Her  kaolin  is 
equal  to  any  in  England,  and  why  will  she  not  lessen  our 
dependence  on  that  country  by  building  up  an  American 
Staffordshire,  and  embodying  in  porcelain  the  conceptions 
of  American  art  ?  And  as  the  product  of  the  quarries  of 
New  Jersey  and  northeastern  Pennsylvania  have  driven 
British  roofing  and  school  slates  from  our  northern  market, 
why  will  she  not  send  hers  to  every  market  in  the  South  ? 
The  country  would  be  none  the  less  powerful  or  respecta 
ble  if  every  child  in  that  section,  however  black,  were 
expert  in  the  use  of  the  slate  and  pencil,  or  if  their  now 
squalid  homes  were  embellished,  as  are  those  of  many  of 
the  working  people  of  the  North,  by  ornate  brackets, 
shelves,  mantles,  pier  slabs,  and  table,  bureau,  and  wash- 
stand  tops  of  what  everybody  but  the  connoisseur  and 
expert  mistakes  for  porcelain,  mosaic,  or  Spanish,  Egyptian, 
red  and  green  Pyreneese,  verd-antique,  Siennese,  porphyry, 
brocatel,  or  other  marbles,  but  which  are  produced  at  little 
cost  from  the  slate  of  Lehigh  county. 

PENNSYLVANIA   CHALLENGES   GENEROUS   COMPETITION. 

Is  it  said,  sir,  that  Pennsylvania  seeks  to  obtain  a  mo 
nopoly  of  the  American  iron  market?  Why,  then,  does 
she  ask  you  to  so  legislate  that  capital  shall  find  its  advan 
tage,  and  the  laborer  become  rich,  in  working  the  unmea 
sured  iron  and  coal-beds  of  her  near  neighbors,  Maryland, 
Virginia,  West  Virginia,  Kentucky,  and  Tennessee  ? 
England  can  no  longer  supply  herself  with  charcoal  pig- 
iron.  She  has  not  the  fuel.  Her  forests  have  yielded  to 
the  demand  for  pasturage  and  sheep  walks.  She  is  in  this 
respect  dependent  on  foreign  countries,  and  buys  such  pig 
metal  as  raw  material  where  she  can  get  it  best  and  cheap 
est,  from  Sweden,  Norway,  Russia,  or  Nova  Scotia,  all  of 
which  are  in  the  same  isothermal  zone,  in  which  are  found 


60  PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR. 

•underlying  forests  which  yield  an  average  of  fifty  cords 
per  acre,  the  inexhaustible  beds  of  better  than  Swedish 
ore  of  the  Marquette  region  of  Michigan  and  Wisconsin. 
And,  gentlemen  of  the  Northwest,  I  ask  you  whether  pa 
triotic  Pennsylvania  manifests  a  disposition  to  tax  you  for 
her  advantage  when  she  challenges  your  competition,  and 
implores  you  to  help  her  to  outdo  England  without  right 
ing  and  enrich  yourselves  by  setting  unemployed  laborers 
at  work  with  the  growth  of  your  own  lands  ?  The  Besse 
mer  or  pneumatic  converter  is  coming  largely  into  use,  and 
the  exigencies  of  the  war  and  the  incidental  protection 
it  has  given  our  industry  have  created  manufactories  of 
American  steel ;  and  in  each  of  these  facts  you  have  a 
guarantee  of  steady  increase  in  the  demand  for  your  un 
rivaled  product,  and  of  the  profits  of  the  railroad  compa 
nies,  which  will  carry  away  your  commodities  and  return 
with  people  to  build  the  cities  your  expanding  iron  and 
steel  works  must  create.  A  few  figures  will  verify  these 
assertions.  Dr.  Eobert  H.  Lamborn,  than  whom  there  is 
no  more  careful  statistician,  tells  us  that — 

"  By  comparing  the  production  of  this  region  with  that  of  other  iron 
districts,  it  will  be  found  that  it  produced  in  1864  more  pig  metal 
than  Connecticut  or  Massachusetts  in  the  same  year,  and  sixty  per 
cent,  more  than  New  York  in  1850.  Reckoning  ore  and  metal  to 
gether,  the  mines  of  Marquette  threw  into  consumption  in  1864 
154,905  tons  of  metal,  or  three-fifths  as  much  as  the  total  pig-iron 
production  of  the  United  States,  according  to  the  census  returns  of 
1850,  and  one-eighth  of  all  the  pig-iron  produced  by  the  United  States 
in  1864." 

In  view  of  these  gratifying  facts,  can  it  be  possible  that 
the  people  of  the  Northwest  are  anxious  for  an  early  re 
newal  of  the  "  tripartite  alliance  formed  by  the  Western 
farmer,  the  Southern  planter,  and  the  English  manufactu 
rer,"  so  exultantly  referred  to  in  "  Cotton  is  King,"  by 
which  the  furnaces  producing  all  this  metal  shall  be  closed, 
and  their  proprietors  and  the  laborers  they  employ  reduced 
to  bankruptcy,  as  those  of  Ohio  and  Pennsylvania  have  so 
often  been  by  British  free  trade  ? 

If,  gentlemen  of  Missouri,  Pennsylvania  is  seeking  a 
monopoly,  why  do  her  people  labor  to  persuade  you  to 
produce  at  the  base  of  Iron  mountain  and  Pilot  Knob  the 
utilities  to  the  creation  of  which  they  devote  their  capital 
and  industry?  No,  our  efforts  are  not  selfish.  We  wish 
to  raise  the  prostrate  South  and  give  her  an  onward  and 


PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR.  61 

upward  career,  and  to  secure  to  the  American  laborer 
wages  so  liberal  that  the  report  thereof  shall  invite  to  our 
shores  the  skilled  and  enterprising  workmen  of  every  craft 
and  country.  By  employing  all  our  people  with  the 
growth  of  oar  own  lands  we  can  create  an  urgent  de 
mand  for  labor,  and  thereby  solve  the  most  difficult  prob 
lem  before  the  country;  for  when  labor  is  in  quick  de 
mand  its  value  will  be  regarded  and  the  rights  of  the 
laborer  protected. 

By  no  other  means  can  the  exhausted  South  be  restored, 
or  the  work  of  her  recuperation  be  commenced.  Who 
will  emigrate  to  the  recently  insurgent  States  ?  Vast  and 
varied  and  peculiar  as  are  their  natural  resources,  will 
capital,  proverbially  timid  as  it  is,  fly  to  a  region  charac 
terized  by  turbulence  and  lawlessness,  or  enterprise  to  a 
land  in  which  labor  is  regarded  as  the  disgraceful  office 
of  a  subject  race,  and  where  legislation  is  employed  to  re 
press  the  intellect  and  suppress  the  aspirations  of  the 
laboring  people  for  a  higher  and  better  life  ?  Sir,  there  is 
not  a  Northern  State  that  does  not  outbid  them  for  emi 
grants  and  offer  superior  inducements  to  the  capitalist  and 
those  that  are  infinitely  more  attractive  to  him  who  has 
but  his  labor  and  that  of  his  family  to  sell.  Pennsylvania 
needs  a  million  laborers.  She  can  feed  and  clothe  and 
house  them  all  should  they  come  to  her  in  the  current 
year.  We  want  them  to  gather  and  refine  petroleum,  to 
construct  and  manage  railroads,  to  conduct  our  internal 
carrying  trade,  to  build  factories,  forges,  furnaces,  foun- 
deries,  and  the  towns  they  will  beget;  to  quarry  slate, 
zinc,  coal,  iron,  marble,  and  the  thousand  other  elements 
of  wealth  condensed  within  the  limits  of  our  State.  Inert 
as  these  natural  elements  of  wealth  are,  they  are  of  no 
available  value ;  but  the  quickening  touch  of  labor  will 
transmute  them  all  to  gold;  and  energy,  enterprise,  and 
capital  in  the  hands  of  men  whose  earlier  years  were 
passed  in  manual  labor,  are  holding  out  to  industry  the 
richest  bribes  to  induce  it  to  come  and  help  pay  our 
national  debt  and  increase  our  country's  power  by  enrich 
ing  themselves  and  us.  But,  sir,  we  offer  higher  induce 
ments  than  wages  in  dollars  and  cents.  Our  equal  laws, 
recognizing  the  fact  that  the  children  of  a  State  are  its 
jewels,  put  a  school-house  near  every  laboring  man's 
dwelling,  and  as  a  reward  for  his  industry,  and  to  increase 
the  power  of  the  State,  secure  to  each  child  coming  into  it 


62  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN"    LABOR. 

the  keys  of  all  knowledge  in  the  mastery  of  the  English 
language,  the  art  of  writing,  and  at  least  the  elementary 
rules  of  arithmetic.  And  in  the  neighborhood  of  every 
hamlet  the  church  spire  points  the  way  from  earth  to 
heaven.  Before  the  altar  employer  and  workman  meet  as 
equals,  and  in  the  same  class  in  the  Sunday-school  their 
children  learn  practical  lessons  of  Christian  equality. 

A  SUGGESTION  AND  EXAMPLE   TO   THE   SOUTH. 

These  are  conditions  that  the  South  cannot  yet  offer  to 
the  emigrant  from  our  fields  or  those  of  Europe.  If  she 
would  prosper  she  must  Americanize  her  system  of  life, 
abandon  her  contempt  for  labor,  and  her  habits  of  violence 
and  disregard  of  law.  She  must  learn  to  respect  man  as 
man,  and  stimulate  his  exertions  by  quickening  his  intel 
lect,  expanding  and  chastening  his  desires,  and  insuring 
him  a  just  reward  for  whatever  he  shall  put  forth  in  the 
way  of  industry,  ingenuity,  or  enterprise.  She  can  only 
create  the  elements  of  her  new  and  great  future  by  devel 
oping  the  resources  now  at  her  command,  the  chief  of 
which  she  will  find  to  be  her  apt  and  docile  laboring  peo 
ple.  Her  present  purpose  seems  to  be  not  to  do  this,  but 
to  enter  on  a  new  career  of  oppression.  Her  dream  is  still 
of  dominion  over  large  plantations  and  imbruited  laborers. 
Let  her  abandon  the  problem,  "  How  can  I  make  my  la 
borers  work  ?  "  and  occupy  herself  upon  the  gentler  one, 
"  How  can  I  induce  these  people  by  whom  I  am  surrounded 
to  enrich  themselves  and  me  ?  "  and  she  will  begin  to  learn 
how  rich  and  powerful  she  is.  When  she  shall  have  ac 
complished  thus  much,  when  her  laborers  are  freely  paid 
and  her  common  schools  offer  shelter  and  culture  to  the 
laborer's  child,  she  may  successfully  appeal  to  those  who 
can  elsewhere  find  wages,  security,  and  equal  chances  in 
life  to  come  and  cast  their  lot  with  her.  She  should  has 
ten  the  coming  of  that  day.  In  common  with  us,  she  is 
burdened  by  the  debt  of  $3,000,000,000  in  which  she  has 
involved  us.  Let  her  remember  that  she,  too,  has  coal, 
iron,  lead,  copper,  zinc,  silver  and  gold,  cinnabar,  tellu 
rium,  and  all  the  elements  of  manufacturing  and  commer 
cial  power  which  characterize  so  abundantly  every  section 
of  our  country ;  that  she  has  broad  land  which  will  not  be 
fully  worked  when  every  man  and  woman  within  its  limits 
may  say,  with  truth,  "  I  am  indeed  an  American  citizen, 
and  have,  by  my  well-requited  voluntary  labor,  earned  the 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  63 

bread  my  dear  family  has  this  day  eaten."  And  she  will 
find  that  she  has  added  vastly  to  her  wealth  when  the  field 
hand  shall  have  been  transformed  into  a  skilled  workman  ; 
when  he  who,  under  the  lash,  has  lazily  hoed  cotton  or 
corn,  under  the  stimulus  of  liberal  wages,  converts  ore  and 
coal  into  rails,  cannon,  or  anchors,  or  into  any  of  the  thou 
sand  minor  fabrics  from  the  fish-hook  and  the  sail  or  pack 
ing  needle  to  the  heavy  and  complicated  lock  advertised 
in  the  catalogue  of  one  concern,  that  of  Russell  &  Erwin, 
of  New  Britain,  in  Connecticut — a  State  producing  so  lit 
tle  iron  as  to  be  scarcely  remembered  when  enumerating 
the  iron-producing  Commonwealths  of  the  country.  This 
concern,  I  am  informed,  sold  but  $30,000  worth  of  goods 
in  the  first  year  of  its  operations,  and  $3,000,000  worth 
during  the  last  year.  Meanwhile  it  has  concentrated  in 
the  village  enlivened  by  its  works  a  thriving  and  highly- 
educated  population,  and  has  converted  unskilled  laborers 
into  mechanics  and  accomplished  mechanicians,  though 
their  hands  were  no  nimbler  or  their  minds  more  compre 
hensive  or  versatile  than  those  of  the  laborers  to  be  found  in 
the  devastated  South,  whose  extermination  or  expatriation 
seems  to  be  within  the  purview  of  those  who  assert  their 
right  to  control  the  policy  of  that  section. 

It  is  not  for  the  rich,  the  comparatively  few  who  have 
accumulated  capital,  that  we  demand  protection.  We  ask 
it  in  the  name  of  the  millions  who  live  by  toil,  whose  de 
pendence  is  on  their  skill  and  ability  to  labor,  and  whose 
labor  creates  the  wealth  of  the  country.  To  what  fearful 
competition  they  are  subjected  when  by  withholding  pro 
tection  we  leave  them  undefended  against  the  assaults  of 
British  capital,  is  aptly  set  forth  by  Daniel  J.  Morrell, 
Esq.,  in  his  admirable  letter  to  the  secretary  of  the  Ame 
rican  Iron  and  Steel  Association.  He  says  : 

"That  portion  of  the  price  of  a  ton  of  imported  iron  which  stands 
for  the  wa^es  of  labor,  represents  coarse  food,  mean  raiment,  and 
worse  lodging,  political  nullity,  enforced  ignorance,  serfdom  in  a  sin 
gle  occupation,  with  a  prospect  of  eventual  relief  from  the  parish. 

"  That  portion  of  the  price  of  a  ton  of  American  iron  which  stands 
for  the  wages  of  labor,  represents  frexh  and  wholesome  food,  good 
raiment,  the  homestead,  unlimited  freedom  of  movement  and  change 
of  occupation,  intelligent  support  of  all  the  machinery  of  municipal. 
State  and  national  Government,  with  a  prospect  of  comfortable  old 
age,  at  last  dividing  its  substance  with  blessings  among  prosperous 
children. 

"  Thus  it  is  easy  to  see  why  imported  iron  may  be  cheap  and 
American  iron  dear ;  for  the  latter,  in  addition  to  its  other  burdens, 


64:  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

pays  an  extraordinary  tax  to  freedom  and  enlightenment,  which  are 
assuredly  deserving  of  protection." 

Mr.  Morrell  evidently  does  not  agree  with  the  magnates 
of  the  South  in  their  opinion  that  the  way  to  make  a  State 
great  and  powerful  is  to  oppress  and  degrade  its  working 
people. 

WE   CAN   PAY   OUR  DEBTS    "WITHOUT   MONEYS." 

I  have  never  been  able  to  believe  that  a  national  debt  is 
a  national  blessing.  I  have  seen  how  good  might  be  in 
terwoven  with  or  educed  from  evil,  or  how  a  great  evil 
might,  under  certain  conditions,  be  turned  to  good  ac 
count;  but  beyond  this,  I  have  never  been  able  to  regard 
debt,  individual  or  national,  as  a  blessing.  It  may  be 
that,  as  in  the  inscrutable  providence  of  God  it  required 
nearly  five  years  of  war  to  extirpate  the  national  crime  of 
slavery,  and  anguish  and  grief  found  their  way  to  nearly 
every  hearth-side  in  the  country  before  we  would  recog 
nize  the  manhood  of  the  race  we  had  so  long  oppressed, 
it  was  also  necessary  that  we  should  be  involved  in  a  debt 
of  unparalleled  magnitude,  that  we  might  be  compelled  to 
avail  ourselves  of  the  wealth  that  lies  so  freely  around  us, 
and  by  opening  markets  for  well-rewarded  industry,  make 
our  land,  what  in  theory  it  has  ever  been,  the  refuge  of 
the  oppressed  of  all  climes.  England,  if  supreme  selfish 
ness  be  consistent  with  sagacity,  has  been  eminently  saga 
cious  in  preventing  us  from  becoming  a  manufacturing 
people;  for  with  our  enterprise,  our  ingenuity,  our  freer 
institutions,  the  extent  of  our  country,  the  cheapness  of 
our  land,  the  diversity  of  our  resources,  the  grandeur  of 
our  seas,  lakes,  and  rivers,  we  should  long  ago  have  been 
able  to  offer  her  best  workmen  such  inducements  as  would 
have  brought  them  by  millions  to  help  bear  our  burdens 
and  fight  our  battles.  We  can  thus  raise  the  standard  of 
British  and  continental  wages,  and  protect  American  work 
men  against  ill-paid  competition.  This  we  must  do  if  we 
mean  to  maintain  the  national  honor.  The  fields  now  un 
der  culture,  the  houses  now  existing,  the  mines  now  being 
worked,  the  men  we  now  employ,  cannot  pay  our  debt. 
To  meet  its  annual  interest  by  taxing  our  present  popula 
tion  and  developed  resources  would  be  to  continue  an  ever- 
enduring  burden. 

The  principal  of  the  debt  must  be  paid;  but  as  it  was 
contracted  for  posterity  its  extinguishment  should  not 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  65 

impoverish  those  who  sustained  the  burdens  of  the  war. 
I  am  not  anxious  to  reduce  the  total  of  our  debt,  and 
would,  in  this  respect,  follow  the  example  of  England,  and 
as  its  amount  has  been  fixed  would  not  for  the  present 
trouble  myself  about  its  aggregate  except  to  prevent  its 
increase.  My  anxiety  is  that  the  taxes  it  involves  shall  be 
as  little  oppressive  as  possible,  and  be  so  adjusted  that, 
while  defending  our  industry  against  foreign  assault,  they 
may  add  nothing  to  the  cost  of  those  necessaries  of  life 
which  we  cannot  produce,  and  for  which  we  must  therefore 
look  to  other  lands.  The  raw  materials  entering  into  our 
manufactures,  which  we  are  yet  unable  to  produce,  but  on 
which  we  unwisely  impose  duties,  I  would  put  into  the 
free  list  with  tea,  coffee  and  other  such  purely  foreign 
essentials  of  life,  and  would  impose  duties  on  commodities 
that  compete  with  American  productions,  so  as  to  protect 
every  feeble  or  infant  branch  of  industry  and  quicken 
those  that  are  robust.  I  would  thus  cheapen  the  elements 
of  life,  and  enable  those  whose  capital  is  embarked  in  any 
branch  of  production  to  offer  such  wages  to  the  skilled 
workmen  of  all  lands  as  would  steadily  and  rapidly  increase 
our  numbers,  and,  as  is  always  the  case  in  the  neighbor 
hood  of  growing  cities  or  towns  of  considerable  extent, 
increase  the  return  for  farm  labor ;  this  policy  would  open 
new  mines  and  quarries,  build  new  furnaces,  forges  and 
factories,  and  rapidly  increase  the  taxable  property  and 
taxable  inhabitants  of  the  country.  Would  the  South 
accept  this  theory  and  enter  heartily  upon  its  execution, 
she  would  pay  more  than  now  seems  her  share  of  the  debt 
and  feel  herself  blessed  in  the  ability  to  do  it.  Her  climate 
is  more  genial  than  ours ;  her  soil  may  be  restored  to  its 
original  fertility ;  her  rivers  are  broad,  and  her  harbors 
good ;  and  above  all,  hers  is  the  monopoly  of  the  fields  for 
rice,  cane  sugar,  and  cotton.  Let  us  pursue  for  twenty 
years  the  sound  national  policy  of  protection,  and  we  will 
double  our  population  and  more  than  quadruple  our 
capital  and  reduce  our  indebtedness  per  capita  and  per  acre 
to  little  more  than  a  nominal  sum.  Thus  each  man  can 
"  without  moneys  "  pay  the  bulk  of  his  portion  of  the  debt 
by  blessing  others  with  the  ability  to  bear  an  honorable 
burden. 

How  protection,  by  animating,  diversifying,  and  reward 
ing  industry,  will  pay  our   debt  is  well  shown   by  the 
experience  of  the  last  five  years.     And  though  we  do  not 
5 


66  PROTECTION'   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

owe  that  experience  to  sagacious  legislation,  bat,  as  I  have 
said,  to  the  exigencies  of  the  war,  it  should  guide  our 
future  steps.  The  disparity  between  gold  and  paper  has 
added  to  the  duties  imposed  on  foreign  products,  and 
enabled  our  manufacturers  to  enter  upon  a  career  of  pros 
perity  such  as  they  have  never  enjoyed,  save  for  a  brief 
period,  under  the  tariffs  of  1824  and  1828,  and  again  for 
four  years  under  that  of  18-12,  a  prosperity  in  which  the 
farmers  are  sharing  abundantly,  as  is  shown  by  the  fact 
that  they  are  now  out  of  debt,  though  most  of  their  farms 
were  mortgaged  five  years  ago.  When  the  war  began  we 
could  not,  as  I  have  said,  make  the  iron  for  a  gun-barrel ; 
we  can  now  export  better  gun-barrels  than  we  can  import. 
We  then  made  no  steel,  and  had  to  rely  on  foreign  coun 
tries  for  material  for  steel  cannon  and  those  steel  pointed 
shot  by  which  alone  we  can  pierce  the  five-and-a-half  inch 
iron-clads  with  which  we  must  contend  in  future  warfare. 
Many  of  our  regiments  that  came  first  to  the  capital  came 
in  rags,  though  every  garment  on  their  backs  was  new, 
and  many  of  them  of  freshly  imported  cloth.  But,  sir,  no 
army  in  the  world  was  ever  so  substantially  clothed  and 
armed  as  that  which  for  two  days  passed  in  review 
before  the  President  of  the  United  States  and  the  Lieuten 
ant  General  after  having  conquered  the  rebellion,  and 
which,  when  disbanded,  was  clad  in  the  product  of  Ameri 
can  spindles  and  looms,  and  armed  with  weapons  of 
American  materials  and  construction. 

It  is  said  that  ten  years  ago  "  a  piece  of  Lake  Superior 
iron  ore  was  a  curiosity  to  most  of  our  practical  metal 
lurgists."  In  1855  the  first  ore  was  shipped  from  Mar- 
quette  county.  How  rapid  the  enlargement  of  the  trade 
has  been  is  shown  by  the  following  statement: 

In  1855  there  were  exported 1,445  tons. 

1856 11,594 

1857 26.184 

1858 , 31,135 

1859 65,679 

1860 116,948 

1861 45,430 

1862 115,720 

1863 185,275 

1864 235,123 

The  production  of  charcoal  pig  iron  in  that  region,  we 
are  told  by  Dr.  Lamborn,  commenced  at  the  Pioneer  works 
near  the  Jackson  mine  in  1858.  Those  works  were  tho 


PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN    LABOR.  67 

* 

pioneers  of  a  great  army,  and  already  the  Collinsville,  the 
Forrestville,  the  Morgan,  and  the  Greenwood  furnaces  are 
in  profitable  operation.  The  production  of  charcoal  iron 
in  that  county  has  been  as  follows  : 

In  1858  there  were  exported  ..............   1,627  tons. 


1859  

7,258 

I860  

5  660 

1861  

7,970 

1862  

8  590 

1863  

8  908 

1  QKA 

1  Q  QQO 

And  though  we  produced  no  steel  in  1860,  a  table  con 
structed  from  information  furnished  by  the  report  of  the 
Commissioner  of  Internal  Revenue  for  the  year  ending 
June  30,  1864,  shows  that  the  Government  had  in  that 
year  derived  §391,141  39  of  internal  revenue  from  the 
steel  made  and  manufactured  in  the  United  States  during 
that  year. 

Time  will  not  permit  me  to  indicate  the  many  new 
branches  of  industry  which  have  sprung  up,  or  the  vast 
extension  and  improvement  of  those  which,  under  our  old 
free  trade  system,  had  found  an  insecure  footing  and  were 
enduring  a  sickly  existence.  I  may,  however,  venture  on 
a  few  remarks  upon  this  head.  California  is  not  a  New 
England  or  an  eastern  State  ;  she  has  perhaps  been  less 
affected  by  the  war  than  any  other  State,  unless  it  be  Ore 
gon;  and  I  find  that,  though  she  raised  in  1859  but  2;378, 
000  pounds  of  wool,  she  raised  in  1863,  7,600,000,  and  in 
1864,  8,000,000  pounds.  She  is,  we  are  assured  by  her 
papers,  realizing  the  advantage  of  bringing  the  producer 
and  consumer  together;  and  though  during  the  last  year 
she  shipped  to  New  York  some  7,500,000  pounds  of  wool, 
she  is  showing  that  her  people  understand  the  importance 
of  saving  the  double  transportation  they  would  otherwise 
pay  on  those  of  their  own  products  they  might  consume  — 
that  for  carrying  the  raw  material  to  the  factory,  and  that 
for  bringing  the  fabrics  back  again.  I  find  in  one  of  her 
papers  the  following  statement  : 

"  CALIFORNIA  WOOLEN  MILLS.  —  The  Pioneer  Mill,  at  Black  Point, 
California,  has  thirty-one  looms  at  work  now,  consumes  annually 
1,200,000  pounds  of  "wool,  employs  220  laborers,  pays  out  $100,000 
yearly  in  wages,  uses  a  capital  of  $500,000,  and  runs  fifty-two  sewing 
machines.  About  one-  fourth  of  the  wool  purchased  is  used  in  mak 
ing  blankets,  the  importation  of  which  has  now  entirely  ceased,  the 
home  production  having  taken  entire  possession  of  the  market. 


63  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

Nearly  half  the  production  is  flannel,  which  is  gradually  crowding 
the  imported  article  out  of  the  market.  About  one-third  of  the  wool 
consumed  at  this  mill  is  made  into  tweeds  and  cassimeres,  which  is 
mostly  made  up  into  clothing  in  San  Francisco.  Broadcloth  is  not 
made  there  in  quantity,  because  of  the  scarcity  of  pure  Merino  wool. 
The  Pioneer  and  Mission  Mills  together  consume  about  2,400,000 
pounds  of  wool,  employ  about  450  laborers  and  $1,000,000  of  capital, 
and  pay  out  $200,000  in  wages  annually." 

Well  done,  California.  Your  tweeds  and  cassimeres 
and  blankets  will  crowd  foreign  articles  not  out  of  your 
own  State  alone,  but  out  of  the  markets  of  the  Pacific 
slope.  You  will  soon  need  machinists  to  construct  your 
sewing-machines  and  make  the  tools  for  those  who  do  such 
work.  Land  around  your  cities  will  grow  in  value;  and 
those  who  own  it  need  not  compete  with  farmers  so  distant 
from  market  as  to  limit  them  to  the  production  of  grain 
alone.  Hay,  potatoes,  turnips,  and  all  other  roots  for  the 
sustenance  of  man  and  beast,  and  fruits  for  the  table,  may 
engage  their  attention  and  give  them  ample  reward  for 
their  labor. 

Oregon  has  also  felt  the  quickening  influence  of  the 
limes.  She  paid  to  the  internal  revenue  department, 
during  1864,  taxes  on  the  manufacture  of  $128,620  67  of 
woolen  cloth. 

THE   PEOPLE   OF   THE   PRAIRIES   NEED  A   PROTECTIVE 
TARIFF. 

The  people  of  the  prairies,  next  to  those  of  the  desolated 
South,  are  interested  in  the  creation  and  maintenance  of 
diversified  industry.  While  they  depend  on  grain-grow 
ing,  and  that  commerce  which  English  free  trade  permits 
the  producers  of  raw  materials  to  enjoy,  cities  will  be 
founded  and  grow  at  points  on  the  lakes  and  rivers ;  but 
none  of  these  even  can  be  great  cities  without  manufac 
tures.  Here  and  there  a  concentration  of  railroads  may 
also  create  a  first-class  town  or  an  inferior  city ;  but  the 
rest  of  their  wide  country  will  be  but  sparsely  populated 
by  an  agricultural  community,  and  dotted  at  wide  distances 
apart  by  beautiful  villages  such  as  now  gratify  the  eye  of 
the  traveler  through  the  West. 

The  prairie  States  have  within  them  the  elements  of 
innumerable  profitable  industries.  The  western  farmer 
clears  his  new  land  by  girdling  and  burning  the  primitive 
forests.  The  wood  is  not  without  value,  and  condensed  as 
it  might  be,  it  would  bear  transportation  to  a  market. 


PROTECTION  TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  69 

Constituents  of  mine  have  been  for  two  years  engaged  in 
erecting  works  which  cover  over  fifteen  acres  of  land  for 
the  production  of  paper  pulp  from  wood.  There  now  lie 
around  their  vast  buildings  thirty-five  thousand  cords  of 
wood  ;  and  in  a  few  days  they  hope  to  put  their  works  in 
operation.  For  awhile  they  ran  part  of  their  machinery 
and  produced  to  their  entire  satisfaction  and  that  of  the 
trade  pulp  which,  intermingled  with  five  per  cent,  or  less 
of  that  produced  from  cotton  rags,  furnished  admirable 
printing  paper. 

Now,  the  corn  husks — ay,  and  the  corn  with  the  husks 
— of  the  farmers  of  the  West,  go  to  waste,  or  find  no 
better  use  than  supplying  them  with  fuel  during  the 
winter.  The  following  article,  clipped  from  the  New 
York  Evening  Post  of  November  25,  invites  them  to 
experiment  and  learn  whether  they  act  more  wisely  in 
wasting  this  material  than  the  southern  planters,  who 
feared  the  establishment  of  American  manufactures,  did 
in  failing  to  utilize  their  cotton  seed,  which,  if  we  may 
accept  De  Bow's  authority,  would  have  produced  from 
§100,000,000  to  $120,000,000  per  annum  if  converted  into 
oil  and  oil  cake : 

"  At  a  recent  meeting  of  the  Institute  of  Technology  in  Boston, 
Mr.  Bond  made  a  statement  of  results  recently  attained  in  this  coun 
try  and  in  Europe  in  the  manufacture  of  paper  from  corn  husks. 
Experiments  upon  this  material  have  been  in  progress  in  Bohemia 
since  1854,  but  have  not  reached  a  satisfactory  result  until  within 
the  last  two  or  three  years.  In  the  successful  processes  lately 
adopted  the  husks  were  boiled  in  an  alkaline  mixture,  after  which 
there  remained  a  quantity  of  fiber  mixed  with  gluten.  The  gluten 
was  extracted  by  pressure,  forming  a  nutritious  article  like  '  oil  cake,' 
and  then  the  fiber  was  subjected  to  other  processes  in  which  it  pro 
duced  the  real  paper  '  stock '  or  '  pulp,'  and  left  a  fiber  which  has  been 
made  into  strong  and  serviceable  cloth.  The  husks  yield  forty  per 
cent,  of  useful  material ;  ten  per  cent,  of  fiber ;  eleven  per  cent, 
gluten,  and  nineteen  per  cent,  of  paper  stock.  This  paper  stock  is 
equal  to  that  made  from  the  best  linen  rags.  Allowing  the  profit 
of  thirty-eight  per  cent,  to  the  manufacturer,  the  different  articles 
can  be  produced  for  six  cents  per  pound  for  fiber,  one  and  a  half 
cent  for  gluten,  and  four  cents  for  paper  stock." 

Were  this  branch  of  manufactures  well  established  on 
the  prairies,  the  press  of  the  West  would  give  up  its 
denunciations  of  the  paper  makers  of  the  country  as  con 
spirators,  monopolists,  and  extortioners,  and  cease  to  pub 
lish  such  paragraphs  as  the  following,  clipped  from  a 
recent  number  of  the  Galena  (Illinois)  Gazette : 


70  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

"  We  understand  that  many  of  the  people  of  Warren  and  other 
towns  in  the  east  part  of  the  county  are  using  corn  for  fuel.  We  had 
a  conversation  with  an  intelligent  gentleman  who  has  been  burning 
it,  and  who  considers  it  much  cheaper  than  wood.  Ears  of  corn  can 
be  bought  for  ten  cents  per  bushel  by  measure,  and  seventy  bushels, 
worth  seven  dollars,  will  measure  a  cord." 

Could  the  people  of  Illinois  bring  themselves  to  believe 
that  they  are  capable  of  doing  any  other  labor  than  raising 
raw  material,  they  would  bring  into  use  cheaper  fuel  than 
corn  or  wood  at  seven  dollars  a  cord.  Their  lands  are 
underlaid  by  lead,  zinc,  copper,  and  iron ;  and  would  they 
determine  to  bring  their  metals  into  market  as  much 
manufactured  as  their  skillpand  supply  of  labor  will  per 
mit,  they  would,  by  creating  a  demand  for  fuel,  compel 
the  development  of  the  magnificent  deposits  of  bituminous 
coal  by  which  nearly  the  whole  State  is  underlaid.  Let 
them  be  admonished  before  it  is  too  late  that  the  fertility 
of  their  soil,  exuberant  as  it  is,  is  not  exhaustless. 

But,  inviting  as  is  this  branch  of  my  subject,  I  must 
leave  it  with  the  remark  that,  ignorant  as  we  are  of  the 
extent  of  our  mineral  deposits,  we  are  more  ignorant  of 
the  uses  to  which  may  be  applied  many  elements  of  life 
with  which  within  a  limited  range  of  purposes  we  are 
quite  familiar ;  and  that,  varied  and  wide  as  are  the  ex 
panding  opportunities  to  achieve  usefulness  and  wealth, 
he  who  embarks  his  capital  or  enterprise  in  such  as  will 
yield  the  most  golden  results  will  not  be  more  benefited 
by  the  introduction  of  new  branches  of  manufacture  than 
the  owners  of  land,  who  will  find  in  the  markets  of  the 
village  and  the  refuse  of  the  factory  the  means  of  follow 
ing  the  methods  of  English  husbandry,  succeeding  the 
exhausting  white  crop  by  a  green  one,  and  giving  to  the 
soil  each  year  more  of  the  elements  of  fertility  than  the 
crop  abstracts  from  it ;  and  who,  having  a  market  at  their 
doors,  will  save  the  transportation  which  now  makes  a 
yard  of  Manchester  cloth  worth  many  bushels  of  wheat  in 
Kansas,  and  a  bushel  of  Kansas  wheat  worth  many  yards 
of  the  same  cloth  in  Manchester.  Under  free  trade 
transporters,  factors,  and  commission  men  absorbed  what 
would  have  been  the  joint  profit  of  the  American  manu 
facturer  and  the  grain-grower,  had  the  producer  and  the 
consumer  been  side  by  side  or  in  reasonable  proximity  to 
each  other. 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  71 

DOMESTIC    COMMERCE    IS     MORE     PROFITABLE    THAN 
FOREIGN. 

There  is  other  commerce  than  that  between  foreign 
nations.  France  and  England  lie  nearer  to  each  other 
than  New  Jersey  and  Ohio,  or  than  Indiana  and  Missouri. 
Commerce  between  New  England  and  the  Pacific  slope 
takes  place  at  the  end  of  longer  voyages  than  that  between 
New  and  Old  England.  A  quick  market  and  active 
capital  make  prosperous  commerce.  Interest  on  borrowed 
capital  is  often  a  fatal  parasite,  and  a  nimble  sixpence  is 
always  better  than  a  sluggish  shilling.  Commerce  is  the 
traffic  in  or  transfer  of  commodities.  It  should  reward 
two  capitals  or  industries — those  of  the  producer  of  each 
commodity ;  and  where  trade  is  reciprocal,  and  really  free, 
each  man  selling  or  buying  because  he  wishes  to  do  so,  it 
does  reward  both.  It  is,  therefore,  apparent,  that  if  we 
consume  American  fabrics,  as  well  as  home-grown  food, 
these  two  profits,  and  a  third,  (two  of  which  now  accrue  to 
foreigners,  one  absolutely  and  the  other  in  great  part,) 
would  remain  in  the  country.  These  are  the  profits  on 
the  production  of  raw  material,  on  its  manufacture,  and  too 
often  on  its  double  transportation.  But  trade  between  a 
country  in  which  capital  is  abundant,  and  the  machinery 
of  which,  having  paid  for  itself  in  profits  already  realized, 
is  cheap,  as  is  the  case  in  England,  and  a  new,  or  in  these 
respects  poor  country,  as  is  ours,  is  never  reciprocal ;  for 
the  party  with  capital  and  machinery  fixes  vthe  terms  on 
which  it  both  buys  and  sells. 

In  addition  to  keeping  both  profits  on  our  commerce  at 
home  and  doing  our  own  carrying,  the  diversification  of 
our  industry  will  insure  markets  for  all  our  products,  and 
render  the  destruction  of  any  one  of  the  leading  interests 
of  the  country  by  a  foreign  commercial  Power  an  impos 
sibility.  By  securing  the  home  market  to  our  industry 
and  giving  security  to  the  investment  of  capital  in  fur 
naces,  forges,  mills,  railroads,  factories,  founderies,  ana 
workshops,  we  can  steadily  enlarge  the  tide  of  immigra 
tion.  Men  will  flow  into  all  parts  of  our  country — some 
to  find  remunerative  employment  at  labor  in  which  they 
are  skilled  ;  some,  finding  that  land,  mineral  wealth,  water- 
power,  and  commercial  advantages  are  open  to  all  in  an 
eminent  degree,  will  come  in  pursuit  of  enterprises  of  mo 
ment,  and  each  new  settlement,  and  each  new  branch  of 


72  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

industry  established,  around  which  thousands  of  people 
may  settle,  will  be  a  new  market  for  the  general  products 
of  our  skill  and  industry:  so  that  we  shall  not  only  be 
come  independent  of  Great  Britain  in  so  far  as  not  to 
depend  on  her  for  that  which  is  essential  to  our  comfort 
>r  welfare,  but  independent  in  having  a  population  whose 
)roductions  will  be  so  diverse  that  though  the  seas  that 
roll  around  us  were,  as  Jefferson  once  wished  them,  "  seas 
of  fire,"  our  commercial,  manufacturing,  and  agricultural 
employments  could  go  on  undisturbed  by  what  was  happen 
ing  in  other  lands.  When  we  shall  have  attained  this 
condition  of  affairs  we  will  build  ships  and  have  foreign 
commerce,  for  we  will  have  that  to  carry  away  which, 
being  manufactured,  will  contain  in  packages  of  little  bulk 
our  raw  material,  food,  mechanical  skill,  and  the  labor 
of  our  machinery ;  and  in  exchange  we  will  get  whatever 
raw  material  we  do  not  produce,  and  the  ability  to 
retain  the  basis  of  a  sound  currency  which  England  and 
France,  by  the  free  trade  they  preach  but  do  not  practice, 
now  draw  from  us  and  other  countries  in  the  position  we 
so  humbly  occupy  of  producers  of  raw  material,  and  whose 
people  lack  the  foresight  or  the  ability  to  supply  them 
selves  with  clothing  and  the  means  of  elegant  life. 

WHAT   CONGRESS   SHOULD   DO. 

Mr.  Chairman,  it  is  not  my  purpose  to  propose  at  this 
time  any  specific  modifications  of  our  tariff  or  internal 
revenue  laws.  They  operate  most  unfortunately  upon 
several  leading  interests  of  the  country.  But  I  have  con 
fidence  in  the  gentlemen  composing  the  Committee  of 
Ways  and  Means,  and  the  suggestive  report  of  the  United 
States  Revenue  Commission  is  now  before  us.  The 
responsibility  will  justly  rest  on  Congress,  if  with  such 
aids  we  fail  to  correct  those  incongruities  in  our  laws 
which  have  prostrated  several  important  branches  of 
manufactures. 

I  may,  however,  remark  that  I  am  opposed  to  prohibi 
tions  or  prohibitory  duties,  but  will  gladly  unite  in 
imposing  on  foreign  manufactured  commodities  such  dis 
criminating  duties  as  will  defend  our  industries  from 
overwhelming  assaults  at  the  hands  of  the  selfish  capital 
ists  who  see  that  Britain's  power  depends  on  Britain's 
manufacturing  supremacy,  and  are  ever  ready  to  expend 
a  portion  of  their  surplus  capital  in  the  overthrow  of  the 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN    LABOR.  73 

rising  industries  of  other  nations.  Judicious  legislation 
on  this  subject  will,  by  inviting  hither  her  skilled  work 
men  and  sturdy  yeomen,  so  strengthen  us  and  enfeeble 
England  that  she  will  not  make  railways  and  other  im 
provements  for  military  purposes  in  Canada,  for  she  will 
see  that,  when  Canada  shall  be  made  the  base  of  military 
operations  against  the  United  States,  her  American  domin- 
ons  will  pass  promptly  into  our  possession. 

WE   ARE    STILL   IN    COLONIAL   BONDAGE   TO    ENGLAND. 

I  find,  sir,  in  a  journal  upon  which  I  am  in  the  habit 
of  relying,  in  an  article  on  the  British  exports  of  iron  and 
steel,  the  statement  that  during  the  seven  months  termin 
ating  July  31,  1865,  the  United  States  purchased  more 
than  one  third  of  the  railroad  and  bar  iron  exported  by 
England.  While  we  were  thus  adding  to  the  wealth  and 
power  of  England,  by  purchasing  one  third  of  her  entire 
export  of  railroad  and  bar  iron,  one  of  her  "men-of-war," 
commanded  by  an  American  traitor,  was  destroying  our 
unarmed  whalers  engaged  in  the  peaceful  pursuits  of  their 
dangerous  trade,  and  our  furnaces,  forges,  and  rolling-mills 
were  idle,  or  but  partially  employed.  The  internal  taxes 
levied  directly  and  indirectly  on  a  ton  of  American  rail 
road  iron  are  heavier  than  the  duty  imposed  on  a  ton  of 
foreign  rails  by  our  tariff',  anc|  at  this  time  most  of  the  fur 
naces  and  rolling-mills  of  our  country  are  suspended.  The 
Pennsylvania  iron  works  at  Danville,  in  that  State,  make 
both  pig  and  railroad  iron.  The  invested  capital  of  the 
company  is  §1,500,000.  When  in  full  operation  it  em 
ploys  twelve  hundred  men,  upon  whom  not  less  than  five 
thousand  women  and  children  depend.  The  works  are 
adapted  to  the  production  of  both  pig  iron  and  rails. 
They  cannot,  however,  produce  an  adequate  supply  of  iron 
for  the  rolling-mills,  and  the  company  are  annual  pur 
chasers  of  pig  iron.  Their  capacity  is  twenty-seven  thou 
sand  tons  of  pig  iron  and  thirty-three  thousand  tons  of 
rails.  Their  actual  production  in  the  last  two  years  was 
but  as  follows : 

In  1864,  Pig  iron 17,154  tons. 

Rails 22,512     " 

In  1865,  Pig  iron 14,758    " 

Bails 15,956     " 

The  Rough  and  Ready  rolling-mill,  in  the  same  town, 
is  capable  of  producing  about  twelve  thousand  tons  of  rails 


Y-i  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

per  annum.  Its  proprietors  purchase  their  pig  iron.  Its 
production  during  the  two  last  years  has  been  in  the  exact 
proportion  to  its  capacity  as  that  of  the  Pennsylvania 
works.  The  difficulty  with  both  is  that  our  internal  taxes 
so  far  more  than  counter-balance  the  protection  afforded 
by  our  tariff  that  when  gold  ranges  at  less  than  forty, 
British  iron  masters  can  undersell  either  in  our  own  mar 
kets.  Our  laws  instead  of  protecting  American  labor, 
thus  discriminate  against  it  and  in  favor  of  that  of  England. 
The  duties  and  internal  taxes  on  iron  evidently  need  re 
vising.  The  interest  is  depressed,  not  only  in  Pennsyl 
vania,  but  in  every  part  of  the  country.  During  the  latter 
part  of  the  seven  months  referred  to,  four  rolling-mills  in 
southeastern  Ohio,  with  a  capacity  of  sixteen  thousand 
tons  of  rails  per  annum,  were  idle,  and  the  blast  furnaces 
in  the  region  which  can  produce  one  hundred  and  thirty- 
five  thousand  tons  of  charcoal  pig  metal,  produced  in  1865 
but  fort-five  thousand. 

Of  the  twenty  furnaces  on  and  near  the  Alleghany  river, 
in  Pennsylvania,  only  eight  were  in  blast  at  the  close  of 
the  year.  I  am  told  there  are  nine  blast  furnaces  in 
Missouri  capable  of  producing  about  forty-five  thousand 
tons,  and  that  but  three  are  now  in  operation.  But  one 
of  the  four  blast  furnaces  near  Detroit  was  in  operation  in 
December.  The  twenty-fiv,e  rolling-mills  of  Pittsburg 
were,  I  am  informed,  then  running  but  quarter-time,  and 
the  production  of  bloom  iron  in  the  counties  of  New  York 
bordering  on  Lake  Champlain  was  in  1865  but  about  one 
third  of  that  of  1864  Let  me  ask,  sir,  whether  Congress 
is  faithful  to  the  laboring  men  of  the  country  when  it  de 
prives  them  of  the  opportunity  to  enrich  themselves  and 
the  country  by  expending  their  labor  on  the  growth  of 
our  own  lands  ? 

From  the  same  journal  I  also  learn  that,  during  the 
same  seven  months,  the  United  States  imported  more  than 
one-half  of  the  unwrought  steel  exported  from  Great 
Britain,  while  a  very  carefully  prepared  list  of  the  steel 
works  of  the  country,  showing  the  kinds  of  steel  made, 
the  product  for  the  last  year,  and  the  capacity  of  each, 
shows  that  the  product  during  the  last  year  was  but 
eighteen  thousand  four  hundred  and  fifteen  tons,  though 
the  capacity  of  the  works  is  forty-two  thousand  one  hun 
dred  tons.  It  thus  appears  that  we  could  have  made  of 
the  growth  of  our  own  lands,  and  by  the  employment  of 


PROTECTION  TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  75 

our  own  people,  every  ton  of  rails,  bar  iron,  and  un- 
wrought  steel  we  imported  during  that  period.  Will  the 
gentleman  from  Indiana  say  that  it  would  not  have  been 
wise  to  withhold  this  patronage  from  our  treacherous  rival 
and  bestow  it  upon  our  toiling  countrymen  ? 

The  western  farmer  and  the  railroad  man  say,  "  Let  me 
buy  iron  and  steel  cheap ;  it  is  my  right  to  buy  where  I  can 
buy  for  least  money ;"  and  their  Eepresentative,  comply 
ing  with  their  wishes,  refuses  to  put  an  adequate  duty 
upon  iron  and  steel.  May  it  not  be  pertinent  to  remind 
these  gentlemen  that  the  manufacturers  of  the  iron  and 
steel  they  import  live  in  houses  built  of  British  timber 
and  British  stone,  and  furnished  with  British  furniture ; 
that  they  are  taught,  so  far  as  they  are  educated,  by  Eng 
lish  teachers ;  attended  in  sickness  by  English  doctors ; 
clothed  and  shod  by  English  artisans ;  and  that  their 
wages  are  expended  in  confirming  British  supremacy  by 
augmenting  British  industry  and  British  commerce;  that 
they  are  fed  with  wheat  gathered  on  the  banks  of  the 
Nile  and  the  Baltic,  or  wherever  England  can  buy  it 
cheapest ;  and  that  General  Jackson's  assertion,  that  to 
transfer  six  hundred  thousand  men  from  agricultural  to 
manufacturing  employments  would  give  us  a  greater  mar 
ket  for  our  agricultural  products  than  all  Europe  now 
supplies,  is  as  true  now  as  it  was  when  first  uttered.  And 
that,  if  we  import  the  men  to  make  the  iron  and  steel  we 
will  need  for  1866,  1867,  and  1868,  the  implements  with 
which  they  will  dig  the  limestone  and  ore,  and  mine  the 
coal,  will  be  of  American  production  ;  the  food  they  will 
eat  will  be  grown  on  American  soil ;  the  timber  of  the 
houses  they  will  occupy  will  be  cut  from  American  forests  ; 
the  stones  with  which  it  will  mingle  will  be  quarried  from 
American  quarries ;  and  the  tailor,  shoemaker,  and  hat 
ter,  the  teacher,  preacher,  and  doctor,  and  all  others 
whose  services  they  will  require,  and  whose  presence  will 
augment  the  population  of  the  village,  the  town,  or  the 
city  will  be  Americans,  and  depend  for  their  supplies  on 
American  labor.  And  may  I  not  ask  whether  the  farmers 
of  the  country,  in  being  relieved  from  colonial  dependence, 
and  having  a  steady  market  thus  brought  to  their  door — 
a  market  in  which  wheat  from  the  banks  of  the  Nile  and 
the  shores  of  the  Baltic  will  never  compete  with  and 
cheapen  theirs — would  not,  though  they  paid  more  dollars 
per  ton,  find  that  they  were  buying  their  iron  and  steel 


76  PROTECTION    TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

cheaper  if  they  gave  fewer  bushels  of  wheat  for  it,  and 
less  frequently  consumed  their  surplus  crops  as  fuel  or 
permitted  them  to  rot  in  the  field  ?  He  does  not  buy 
most  cheaply  who  pays  least  money  for  the  articles  he 
gets,  but  he  who  gives  the  least  percentage  of  his  day's, 
month's  or  year's  labor  in  exchange  for  a  given  com 
modity  ;  and  tested  by  this  standard,  the  cheapest  market 
-in  which  iron  and  steel  can  be  bought  for  American  pur 
poses  will  be  found  in  the  protected  market  of  America. 

PROTECTION    CHEAPENS   GOODS. 

But  protection  begets  competition  and  invariably 
cheapens  the  money  value  of  commodities.  This  is  not 
mere  theory  ;  it  is  fact  established  by  the  experience  of 
all  nations  that  have  protected  their  industry.  Washing 
ton's  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  understood  this  as  per 
fectly  as  the  adept  in  social  science  understands  it  to-day. 
Every  nation  that  ever  protected  its  industry  improved 
the  quality  and  lessened  the  price  of  its  productions ;  and 
no  people,  while  not  protecting  their  manufactures,  have 
ever  been  able  to  hold  a  fair  position  among  the  commer 
cial  nations  of  the  world,  because  they  could  not  compete 
in  cheapness  with  protected  industries.  While  Holland 
protected  her  industry  more  adequately  than  England,  she 
sold  her  cheap  goods  in  that  country  and  maintained  her 
supremacy  on  the  seas.  It  was  then  that  the  Dutch  raised 
the  ire  of  Andrew  Yarrinton  by  taunting  Englishmen 
with  their  want  of  skill,  and  England  with  her  want  of 
civilization,  in  selling  her  raw  products  at  the  price  others 
would  give,  and  buying  back  part  of  them  when  manufac 
tured  at  the  price  at  which  others  would  sell.  But  when 
England  perfected  her  protective  system,  her  superior  advan 
tages  in  coal  and  iron  gave  her  commercial  supremacy,  by 
enabling  her  to  cheapen  articles  she  had  believed  herself 
unable  to  produce,  and  to  employ  British  ships  in  carry 
ing  English  fabrics  to  mere  growers  of  raw  material  in 
every  part  of  the  world. 

France,  as  I  have  shown,  protects  her  industry,  and  her 
silks,  laces,  cloths,  cassimeres,  and  products  of  iron  and 
steel  hold  their  place  in  the  markets  of  the  world  in  spite 
of  England's  larger  commercial  marine  and  more  abun 
dant  supply  of  coal  and  iron.  Has  protection  increased 
the  price  of  anything  but  labor  in  Germany  ?  Before  the 
establishment  of  the  Zoll-Verein  or  Customs-Union  she 


PROTECTION   TO    AMERICAN    LABOR.  77 

exported  nothing  but  raw  materials,  and  was  only  too 
happy,  as  I  have  shown,  to  send  with  these,  her  peasantry 
either  for  war  or  civic  purposes;  but  under  the  influence 
of  protection  the  value  of  man  has  risen  in  Germany,  and 
that  of  German  products  fallen  in  the  markets  of  the 
world,  till  her  cloths  and  the  multifarious  products  of  her  di 
versified  industry  compete  with  those  of  England  and  France 
in  the  markets  of  the  United  States,  and  other  nations  whose 
people  devote  themselves  to  the  production  of  raw  materials 
Even  Russia,  with  her  thirty  millions  of  recently  freed  serfs, 
who  enter  upon  the  duties  of  freemen  without  disturbance, 
because  the  wise  Emperor  who  enfranchised  them  had 
secured  employment  and  wages  for  each  by  protecting  the 
industry  of  all,  is  now  entering  into  the  general  markets 
of  the  world  in  competition  with  France,  Germany,  Bel 
gium,  and  England.  But  we  enter  no  foreign  market  with 
productions  which  attest  our  wealth,  skill,  genius,  or  enter 
prise  ;  and  the  prices  of  what  we  do  export — grain,  coarse 
provisions,  and  whisky — depend  on  such  contingencies  as 
drought,  excessive  rain,  the  potato  rot,  or  other  wide 
spread  calamity  for  a  transatlantic  market.  When  good 
crops  prevail  in  Europe  there  is  no  market  there  for  us. 
Consistent  with  the  experience  of  other  nations  has  been 
our  own.  Under  the  tariffs  of  1824  and  1828  the  prices 
of  all  those  commodities  in  the  production  of  which  our 
people  engaged  to  any  extent  fell  rapidly.  When  the 
tariff  of  18i2  went  into  effect  our  country  was  flooded 
with  British  hardware  of  every  variety,  from  a  tenpenny 
nail  to  a  circular  saw,  and  from  table  cutlery  to  butt 
hinges,  thumb  latches,  etc.  But  when  1847  came  round, 
four  years  of  adequate  protection  had  so  stimulated  the 
skill  and  ingenuity  of  Americans,  and  had  brought  from 
Great  Britain  so  many  skilled  workmen,  that  our  own 
market,  at  least,  was  ours  for  an  infinite  variety  of  iron 
ware,  and  we  have  held  it  in  many  departments  of  the 
business  from  that  day  to  this,  no  nation  having  been  able 
to  undersell  us  in  our  own  streets.  If,  sir,  we  are  now 
paying  too  high  for  iron  and  steel-ware,  we  are  but  suffer 
ing  the  penalty  of  our  folly.  Had  we  continued  the  pro 
tection  afforded  by  the  tariff  of  1842,  or  modified  it  from 
time  to  time  as  branches  of  business  and  the  condition  of 
the  market  required,  by  transferring  the  duties  that  had 
defended  and  advanced  a  branch  of  industry  to  articles 
needing  greater  protection,  we  would  now  be  producing 


78  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

an  adequate  supply  of  cheap  iron  for  our  own  use,  and 
competing  with  France  and  England  in  the  markets  of 
Mexico  and  Central  and  South  America.  We  are  thus,  I 
say,  paying  the  penalty  of  our  own  folly  in  having  de 
stroyed  our  industry  and  rendered  the  investment  of  capi 
tal  in  manufacturing  enterprises  insecure.  Let  but  the 
capitalists  of  the  country  know  that  Congress  will  so 
revise  the  duties  on  railroad  iron  as  to  give  it  adequate 
protection  over  the  taxation  its  production  encounters 
under  the  law  for  raising  internal  revenue,  and  competi 
tion  will  spring  up  all  over  the  country  and  make  from 
the  growth  of  our  own  lands  cheaper  and  better  iron  or 
steel  rails  than  we  can  import. 

How  can  it  be  otherwise  ?  Do  not  the  people  of  Michi 
gan  and  Wisconsin  wish  to  develop  their  resources  and 
make  them  available?  Are  the  people  of  Missouri  insen 
sible  to  the  advantages  which  would  flow  from  deriving 
income  from  the  conversion  of  their  mountains  of  ore 
into  rails,  machinery,  and  hardware  ?  Will  not  the  peo 
ple  of  Tennessee  allow  the  descendants  of  the  colored  men 
who  worked  his  furnaces  and  gave  Cave  Johnson  his 
majority  in  his  first  contest  for  Congress,  and  others  like 
them,  to  enrich  that  devastated  State  by  working  her 
mines  and  bringing  her  forges  and  furnaces  again  into 
profitable  use  ?  And  why  may  not  the  whir  of  the  roll 
ing-mill  be  heard  throughout  Kentucky,  Tennessee,  Vir 
ginia,  Georgia,  and  other  Southern  States  which  are 
heavily  underlaid  with  iron  ?  There  will  be  quick  de 
mand  for  the  yield  of  all  if  we  determine  to  develop  the 
wealth  of  our  whole  country,  and  interlace  its  parts,  as  we 
should,  with  railroads.  By  excluding  from  our  markets 
one-third  of  the  annual  export  of  railroad  and  bar  iron 
from  England  we  will  bring  hither  the  men  who  make  it. 
Why  should  we,  with  the  capacity  established  in  five  years 
— for  when  the  war  began  and  furnished  its  incidental 
protection,  the  manufacture  of  steel  was  unknown  in  our 
country — why  should  we,  who  in  five  years  have  created 
facilities  for  manufacturing  about  fifty  thousand  tons  of 
steel  per  annum,  buy  from  England  one-half  of  her  entire 
export  of  unwrought  steel  ?  Bather  let  us  enfeeble  her 
and  strengthen  our  country  by  bringing  hither  the  men 
who  make  it.*  The  iron  of  the  States  I  have  named, 

*  How  effectively  the  diversification  of  our  industries  and  the  better  wages  pro 
tective  duties  enable  us  to  pay  for  labor  is  doing  this,  is  thus  shown  by  Professor 


PROTECTION"   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  79 

and  I  may  say  of  almost  every  State  of  the  Union,  would 
give  us  steel  as  pure  and  tenacious  as  England  can 
make.  The  establishment  of  this  branch  of  trade  would 
lead  to  immense  internal  commerce,  and  reward  our 
railroads  with  business  that  would  flow  both  ways  in  all 
seasons  of  the  year.  The  ores  of  the  Marquette  region 
will  be  in  request  in  every  iron-producing  State,  as  those 
,of  Sweden,  Norway,  Kussia,  and  Nova  Scotia  are  in 
France  and  England. 

WHY  AN  EXPORT   DUTY   SHOULD   BE   LAID   ON   COTTONS 

Mr.  Chairman,  permit  me,  in  drawing  to  a  conclusion, 
to  repeat  that  we  need  not  resort  to  the  prohibitions  which 
have  been  practiced  by  other  countries.  Our  natural 
advantages  and  those  which  spring  from  our  personal  free- 
Kirk  of  Edinburgh.  His  figures  also  prove  that  British  emigrants  are  no  longer 
chiefly  agricultural  laborers,  but  skilled  artisans.  He  says  : 

"  So  long  as  there  is  inhabitable  surface  on  the  earth  not  yet  occupied,  it  is 
probable  we  shall  have  emigration.  This  abstract  thought,  however,  has  very 
little  to  do  with  the  actual  facts  of  emigration  as  it  now  goes  on.  It  is,  as  we 
have  seen,  a  great  delusion  for  men  to  think  that  our  emigrants  are  going  away 
from  us  because  there  is  no  room  for  them  in  their  native  land.  It  is  a  still 
greater  delusion  to  imagine  that  it  is  a  relief  to  those  who  remain  behind  to  be 
quit  of  those  who  go.  If  our  readers  will  give  us  a  little  careful  attention,  we 
may  be  able  to  make  the  truth  clear  as  to  our  situation  in  this  important 
matter. 

"  In  1815,  the  total  emigration  from  the  United  Kingdom  was  2081— in  1866,  it 
had  risen  to  204,882.  That  is  such  an  increase  as  may  well  arrest  the  attention  of 
all  who  feel  interested  in  their  country.  There  were  higher  years  than  1866; 
but  these  had  to  do  with  the  gold  fever,  and  need  not  be  taken  into  account  in 
our  present  paper.  In  1852,  for  example,  the  number  of  emigrants  rose  to 
368,764 ;  but  87,881  of  these  went  to  Australia  and  New  Zealand.  It  is  to  the 
steady  flow  of  nearly  200,000  persons  a  year,  as  reached  from  the  small  begin 
ning — 2081  in  1815 — that  it  is  interesting  to  turn  attention. 

"And  yet  it  is  far  more  interesting  to  consider  the  destination  of  these  emi 
grants.  The  number  from  1815  gives  a  grand  total  of  6,106,392  persons,  and  of 
these  no  less  than  5,044,809  went  to  North  America.  Large  as  the  Australian  and 
New  Zealand  exodus  has  been,  it  had  reached  only  929,181  in  18fi6  ;  that  is,  it 
had  not  reached  one  million  when  the  American  had  gone  beyond  five.  It  is 
important,  too,  to  notice  that  by  far  the  largest  number  of  our  emigrants  to 
America  go  to  the  United  States.  In  1866,  those  to  the  '  colonies  '  were  13,255, 
while  to  the  States  they  reached  the  high  number  of  161,000.  It  is  therefore 
very  clear  that  it  is  with  America  we  have  specially  to  do  in  considering  the 
bearings  of  this  vast  and  growing  emigration.  The  States  of  America  are  not 
now  a  new  country.  They  begin  to  have  all  the  characteristics  of  an  old  estab 
lished  nation,  especially  in  their  northern  and  eastern  portions.  New  England 
is  a  well  peopled  region  of  the  world  j  and,  to  as  great  an  extent  as  Old  Eng 
land,  it  may  be  regarded  as  a  manufacturing  country,  and  certainly  not  a  land 
remaining  to  be  occupied.  An  emigration  from  Britain  to  these  States  is  not  a 
going  forth  to  subdue  the  wilds  of  the  earth's  surface,  but  to  increase  the  popu 
lation  of  large  manufacturing  centres. 

"  This  leads  us,  however,  to  notice  further,  the  nationality  of  the  emigrants 
going  from  us.  Up  to  1847,  the  emigration  was  from  Ireland  in  a  very  much 
larger  proportion  than  from  the  rest  of  the  Empire.  During  the  following  eight 
years  the  flow  from  Ireland  became  comparatively  low,  though  it  still  keeps  up 
to  a  high  rate.  The  emigration  from  Scotland  was  next  in  importance  to  that 


80  PROTECTION"   TO    AMERICAN    LABOR. 

dom,  are  sufficient  to  relieve  us  from  all  difficulty  on  this 
point.  There  is,  however,  one  of  our  agricultural  pro 
ductions  upon  which,  did  the  Constitution  permit,  I  would 
lay  an  export  duty ;  and  that  is  cotton.  And  I  hope  the 
Constitution  will  be  so  amended  as  to  permit  it;  for 
though  for  years — for  the  life  of  more  than  a  generation — 
the  country  was  ruled  in  the  interest  of  slavery,  to  the 
destruction  of  the  interests  and  rights  of  our  free  laborers, 
by  the  pretended  apprehension  that  if  American  cotton 
were  not  cheapened  rival  fields  would  be  developed,  the 
delusion  has  been  dispelled,  and  all  men  know  that  ours 
are  the  only  available  cotton  fields  of  the  world.  For  five 
years  we  maintained  along  the  coast  of  the  cotton  States  a 

of  Ireland^  when  the  extent  of  our  population  is  taken  into  account.  England, 
with  six  times  as  many  people  as  Scotland,  sent  but  few  emigrants  till  of  late 
years.  The  Irish  emigration  was  so  great,  that  in  1851  the  census  revealed  a 
deficiency  in  the  population  amounting  to  2,555,720.  That  is,  had  Ireland  had 
no  emigration  in  the  ten  years  previous  to  1851,  she  would  have  had  2,555,720 
more  than  were  actually  in  the  island.  In  1861,  there  had  been  a  positive  de 
crease  of  751,251,  instead  of  an  increase  of  a  much  larger  figure,  and  it  is  anti 
cipated  that  there  will  be  a  still  more  important  decrease  in  1871.  In  1851,  but 
more  so  in  1861,  Scotland  was  found  to  be  affected  in  a  somewhat  similar  way, 
though  not  to  the  extent  of  producing  an  actual  decrease  in  the  number  of  peo- 

Sle.  Instead  of  an  increase  of  twelve  or  thirteen  per  cent.,  as  was  in  former 
ecades,  there  was  only  one  of  six  per  cent,  from  1851  to  1861.  The  rate  of  in 
crease  in  England  and  Wales  had  not  been  sensibly  affected.  Now  the  chief 
stream  of  emigration  is  flowing  from  England.  In  the  first  or  winter  quarter 
of  the  year  1869  the  emigration  was  2702  Scotch,  9800  Irish,  and  11,100  Eng 
lish.  It  need  not  be  told  any  one  who  thinks  and  reads  at  all  on  the  subject 
that  it  is  now  in  England  almost  exclusively  we  have  excitement  in  connection 
with  emigration.  And  we  may  assuredly  calculate  that  the  census  of  1871,  and 
far  more  fully  that  of  1881,  if  matters  go  on  as  now,  will  reveal  a  decrease  in 
the  population  south  of  the  Tweed. 

"  What  is  the  great  relation  in  which  these  three  kingdoms  stand  to  each  other  and 
mankind  ?  Ireland  is  agricultural  and  pastoral ;  so  is  Scotland  to  a  great  ex 
tent  ;  England  is  the  workshop  for  these  and  for  the  world.  There  is  a  small 
manufacturing  power  in  Ireland,  a  much  greater  in  Scotland,  but  by  far  the 
greatest  of  all  in  England.  This  explains  how  emigration  did  not  set  in  on 
England  or  on  Scotland,  as  it  has  done  on  Ireland.  It  also  explains  why  it  did 
not  till  now  affect  England  as  it  has  affected  Scotland.  A  pastoral  people  are 
the  first  to  emigrate  in  the  course  of  nature.  An  agricultural  people  are  the 
next  in  order.  From  a  land  like  this  a  manufacturing  people  would  never  emi 
grate  if  matters  were  right.  The  climate  and  mineral  store  of  this  country  are 
such  that  no  other  country  can  at  present  compete  with  it  in  manufacturing 
power,  if  the  natural  course  of  things  were  followed.  Even  our  shepherds  have 
an  immense  advantage  at  home,  and  our  farmers  have  a  still  greater  advantage, 
but  our  manufacturers  have  so  great  facilities  as  can  scarcely  at  present  be 
equalled.  It  is,  consequently,  matter  of  extreme  interest  when  we  find  that 
England  is  emigrating.  It  introduces  us  to  the  mining,  mechanical,  and  manu 
facturing  character  of  our  emigrants  now.  There  are  above  70,000  souls  in  the 
east  end  of  London  who  must  emigrate  speedily  or  die.  They  are  being  shipped 
off  as  fast  as  charity  and  Government  can  transport  them  to  North  America. 
Above  25,000  of  these  are  workmen  more  or  less  skilled  in  engineer  and  ship 
building  occupations.  These  are  not  shepherds,  nor  are  they  ploughmen,  nor 
will  they  ever  be  to  an}-  great  extent  one  or  the  other.  They  are  mechanics,  and 
will  be  so  go  where  they  may.  In  the  vast  hives  of  industry  in  Lancashire  there 


PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  81 

blockade  such  as  never  was  attempted  before.  The  people 
of  those  States  planted  no  cotton  and  burned  much  of 
what  they  had  produced,  and  did  all  that  madness  or 
ingenuity  could  suggest  to  develop  rival  fields  if  any  ex 
isted;  and  what  is  the  result?  Necessity  constrained  the 
temporary  use  of  Indian  cotton,  and  Calcutta  became  so 
rich  that  her  ryots  put  silver  tires  around  their  cart  wheels. 
But  when  the  power  of  our  armies  had  reopened  the  cot 
ton  fields  of  the  South,  when  it  became  known  that  freecl- 
rnen  were  working  upon  the  Sea  Islands,  and  that  our 
Government  was  again  to  possess  the  cotton  region  of  the 
South,  there  came  a  fearful  revulsion  in  India,  and  all 
men  acknowledged  that  God  had  given  the  United  States 
a  monopoly  of  the  available  cotton  fields  of  the  earth. * 
Upon  that  one  production  we  should  put  an  export  duty, 

are  a  greater  number  who  must  emigrate  or  (He.  These  are  getting  off  as  fast  as 
they  possibly  can  to  Massachusetts  to  find  full  occupation  in  cotton.  Not  one 
is  either  pastoral  or  agricultural,  and  few  are  likely  ever  to  be  either.  Irish 
men  and  Scotchmen  can  be  anything,  but  not  so  Englishmen,  and  they  will  not 
need  to  be  anything  in  the  world  but  what  they  have  been.  Their  skill  is  too 
valuable  to  be  sent  to  the  backwoods  when  abundance  of  rough  hands  are  there 
already,  and  skilled  men  are  needed  to  make  a  great  country  fit  to  manufacture 
for  itself.  Till  within  the  last  four  years  our  emigrants  were  chiefly  pastoral 
and  agricultural,  now  they  are  chiefly  mining,  Mechanical,  and  manufacturing. 
It  is  to  this  that  we  feel  it  of  such  importance  to  call  attention.  Our  position  as 
a  nation  depends  to  a  great  extent,  upon  our  usefulness  to  the  world  in  a 
mechanical  and  manufacturing  line.  Commerce  has  its  being  in  the  fact  that 
one  nation  is  so  situated  that  it  excels  in  one  thing,  while  another  excels  ia 
another.  It  is  in  the  exchange  of  produce  that  all  trade  lies,  and  such  exchange 
clearly  depends  on  the  excelling  we  have  mentioned.  If  this  nation  loses  its 
excellence  in  manufacturing  power,  it  loses  its  only  possible  share  in  the  ex 
change  of  the  world,  and  its  commerce  dies. 

"  We  must  also  look  at  the  effect  of  emigration  on  the  character  of  the  popu 
lation  left  behind.  How  do  the  Emigration  Commissioners  account  for  the  vast 
deficiencies  in  the  population  of  Ireland  ?  More  than  two  millions  and  a  half 
of  deficiency  was  double  the  emigration,  but  it  was  accounted  for  by  the  fact 
that  the  young  men  and  women  had  gone  off  to  such  a  degree  that  marriages  and 
births  had  fallen  off  sufficiently  to  account  for  all.  '  The  proportion  of  persons 
between  the  ages  of  twenty  and  thirty-five,'  in  the  ordinary  settled  course  of 
society,  is  about  twenty-five  per  cent. — that  proportion  among  emigrants  is  above 
fifty-two  per  cent.  This  is  not  the  only  matter  of  consideration  at  this  point. 
Miss  Rye,  in  a  letter  to  the  Times,  some  months  since,  said  :  'I  will  not,  I 
dare  not,  spend  my  time  in  passing  bad  people  from  one  port  to  another.'  And 
'  bad  people  '  cannot,  as  a  rule,  pass  themselves;  they  have  generally  no  incli 
nation  to  do  so.  No  doubt  bad  enough  people  go,  but  that  is  not  the  rule.  We 
dare  not  now  send  our  criminals  abroad,  nor  dare  we  send  our  paupers,  nor 
should  we  be  allowed  to  send  any  class  unfit  to  support  themselves.  It  in  the  be»t 
vf  our  mechanical  and  manufacturing  hands  that  ore  now  going,  and  they  nre 
leaving  the  proportion  of  those  who  burden  society  largely  increased.'  " — Kirk  : 
Social.  Politics  in  Great  Britain  and  Ireland,  page  112.  London  and  Glasgow. 
1870. 

*  An  export  duty  of  2  cents  a  pound  on  unmanufactured  cotton,  coupled  with 
the  free  export  of  yarns  and  fabrics,  would  soon  transfer  the  capital,  skill,  and 
machinery  of  Lancashire  to  our  cotton  growing  States,  in  most  of  which  exhaustless 
water-power  runs  to  waste. 

6 


82  PROTECTION"   TO    AMERICAN   LABOR. 

and  the  result  would  be  that  the  men  of  the  cotton  States,  no 
longer  dependent  on  England  for  a  market  for  their  bulky 
raw  material,  would,  with  their  cheaper  fabrics,  drive  her 
cotton  goods  from  the  markets  of  the  world.  Though  I 
would  not,  by  legislation,  prohibit  the  export  of  the 
elements  of  any  branch  of  manufacture  or  machinery,  I 
will  endeavor  to  retain  in  the  country  many  of  the  ele 
ments  of  manufactures  that  now  go  abroad,  by  making 
them  more  valuable  in  this  country  than  in  any  other,  and 
by  impressing  upon  the  American  people  the  conviction, 
so  long  ago  inculcated  upon  the  people  of  Ireland  by  Dean 
Swift,  that  to  enrich  themselves  they  must 

"  Carry  out  their  own  goods  as  much  manufactured  and  bring  in 
those  of  others  as  little  manufactured  as  the  nature  of  mutual  com 
merce  will  allow." 

To  gratify  our  patriotic  desires  we  need  not  resort  to 
prohibitory  duties.  We  can  nationalize  our  policy  by 
relieving  from  duty  tea,  coffee,  and  every  raw  material 
which  we  do  not  produce,  but  which  enters  into  our  manu 
factures  or  arts.*  I  would  give  the  wool-growers  protec 
tion,  but  would  stimulate  the  manufacture  of  carpets  and 
increase  the  demand  for  American  wool  by  admitting  free 
of  duty  those  low  grades  which  we  do  not  produce ;  and 
would  lay  light  duties  on  those  articles  in  the  manufacture 
of  which  machinery  has  been  perfected  and  large  capitals 
have  been  accumulated,  especially  where  the  original'  cost 
of  the  machinery  has  been  returned  in  profits ;  and  would 
make  them  heavier  and  heaviest  upon  those  branches  of 

*  American  production,  furnishing  all  National  power,  is  to  the  country,  its 
commerce,  and  trade,  on  a  large  scale,  what  the  water-wheel  and  the  steam  en 
gine  are  to  mills  and  machinery  on  a  small  one — the  prime  mover.  In  the 
absence  of  this  great  National  prime  mover,  as  it  may  be  called,  all  motion,  nay, 
even  the  life  of  the  body  politic  itself  must  cease.  As  all  of  the  people  of  the 
country  must  ultimately,  directly  or  indirectly,  live  off  of  or  from  this  production, 
so  must  all  taxes,  National,  State,  and  local,  be  finally  drawn  from  American 
producers,  unless  some  portion  of  our  taxation  can  be  levied  upon  foreigners  who 
seek  our  markets,  and  enjoy  the  advantages  and  profits  thereof. 

Such  being  the  case,  it  follows  that  the  American  producer  has  a  right  to 
demand  that  his  Government  shall  levy  duties  on  foreign  imports,  and  in  so 
doing  shall  levy  them,  first  and  foremost  upon  those  commodities  the  like  of 
which  are  produced  in  this  country,  for  the  following  reasons  : 

First.  Because  such  commodities  come  in  direct  competition  with  the  produc 
tions  of  American  producers  who  are  obliged  to  pay  National,  State,  and  local 
taxes  ;  and  to  grant  privileges  to  foreigners  which  are  and  must  be  withheld 
from  ourselves  would  be  a  manifest  and  gross  injustice  on  the  part  of  the  Govern 
ment  to  its  own  people. 

Second.  Inasmuch  as  these  commodities  are  such  as  are  produced  in  this  coun 
try,  foreigners  may  be  made  to  pay  the  duties  thereon,  as,  having  American 
competitors  with  whom  they  must  compete,  these  duties  must  first  be  paid  by 
them  before  they  can  place  themselves  in  a  position  for  such  competition.  If 


PROTECTION    TO   AMERICAN   LABOR.  83 

industry  which  are  most  feeble  but  give  assurance  of  ulti 
mate  success.  When  we  do  this  our  country  will  cease 
to  be  a  mere  agglomeration  of  sections,  and  we  will  be  a 
national  people,  homogeneous  in  our  interests  by  reason  of 
their  immense  diversity. 

Such,  sir,  is  my  plan  for  enforcing  the  Monroe  doctrine, 
acquiring  Canada,  paying  the  national  debt,  and  by  reliev 
ing  the  South  of  its  embarrassment,  recementing  the 
shattered  Union.  The  poor  whites  must  be  weaned  from 
the  rifle,  net,  and  line,  by  the  inducements  of  well-re 
warded  labor.  Their  idle  wives  and  children  may  thus  be 
brought  to  habits  of  order,  method,  and  industry,  and  in 
a  few  years  we  shall  cease  to  remember  that  in  this  nine 
teenth  century,  and  under  our  republican  Government, 
there  were  for  several  decades  millions  of  people  tending 
rapidly  to  barbarism.  The  same  inducements  will  disclose, 
even  to  the  eye  of  prejudice,  the  manhood  of  the  freed  man, 
and  that  kindly  relation  between  the  employer  and  his 
employe  which  exists  throughout  the  busy  North  and 
East  will  spring  up  in  the  South.  Oppressed  and  degraded 
as  he  has  been,  the  colored  man  will  find  that  there  are 
fields  open  to  his  enterprise,  and  a  useful  and  honorable 
career  possible  to  him,  and  will  prove  that,  like  other 
men,  he  loves  property  and  has  the  energy  to  acquire  it, 
the  ability  to  retain  it,  and  the  thrift  to  make  it  advan 
tageous  to  himself,  his  neighbors,  and  his  country. 

Let  us  then  measure  our  resources  by  experiment  and 
open  them  to  the  enterprise  of  the  world ;  and  the  ques 
tion  whether  we  owe  three  hundred  or  three  thousand 
millions  will,  ten  years  hence,  be  one  of  trifling  import- 
not  made  to  pay  these  particular  duties,  there  are  no  other  taxes  which  they  can, 
by  any  possibility,  be  made  to  pay  in  selling  in  our  markets;  and  the  heavily 
taxed  American  has  an  absolute  right  to  demand  that,  enjoying  the  advantages 
and  profits  of  these  markets,  foreigners  shall  take  with  them  some  of  the  many 
drawbacks  and  disadvantages  which  he  himself  is  obliged  to  bear. 

Third,  Because  if  these  duties  are  in  whole  or  in  part  levied  upon  productions 
the  like  of  which  we  do  not  ourselves  produce,  and  must  or  will  have,  they  must 
ultimately  and  inevitably  fall  upon  the  shoulders  of  American  producers,  thus 
causing  them  to  be  again  taxed,  indeed  almost  encompassing  them  by  a  net 
work  of  taxation,  escape  from  which  is  impossible. 

Hence  we  develop  the  grand  and  immutable  principle:  That  the  moral  right 
of  the  Government  to  levy  duties  on  articles  the  like  of  which  are  not,  produced  in 
this  country,  only  commences  when  it  has  exhausted  all  the  mentis  of  collecting 
duties  on  such  articles  as  are  produced  in  the  country,  or  until  it  has  reached  a  full 
measure  of  the  burdens  imposed  upon  American  producers  and  still  finds  itself  in. 
need  of  revenue.  Then,  and  then  only,  may  it,  consistently  with  the  rights  of  Ameri 
can  producers,  resort  to  other  sources  of  taxation,  including  duties  on  the  importa 
tion  of  commodities  the  like  of  which  are  not  produced  in  the  country. — The  Right* 
of  American  Producers.  By  Henry  Carey  Baird,  Philadelphia,  1870. 


8J:  PROTECTION   TO   AMERICAN   LABOR. 

ance;  and,  as  Andrew  Yarrinton  showed  the  people  of 
England  how  to  "outdo  the  Dutch  without  fighting,"  we 
will  find  that  peace  hath  her  victories  for  us  also ;  Canada 
will  come  to  us  like  ripe  fruit  falling  into  the  hands  of  the 
farmer ;  and  if  Maximilian  remain  in  Mexico,  it  will  be  as 
the  citizen  of  a  republic  and  an  adherent  of  the  Monroe 
doctrine. 


TRADE  WITH  BRITISH  AMERICA. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
MARCH  7,  1866. 

THE  House,  as  in  Committee  of  the  Whole  on  the  state  of  the 
Union,  having  under  consideration  the  bill  (H.  R.  No.  337)  regulat 
ing  trade  with  the  British  North  American  possessions — 

Mr.  Kelley  said : 

Mr.  Chairman :  If  I  had  made  my  remarks  yesterday 
afternoon,  I  should  have  added  another  to  the  many  illus 
trations  I  have  given  this  session  of  the  mistake  made  by 
the  gentleman  from  Illinois  [Mr.  WentworthJ  when  he 
said  I  never  took  less  than  an  hour  when  I  got  the  floor, 
for  I  am  quite  sure  that  twenty  minutes  would  then  have 
sufficed  me.  But  I  have  had  a  night  in  which  to  examine 
the  provisions  of  this  bill  and  to  reflect  upon  them,  and  I 
shall  probably  ask  the  attention  of  the  House  for  a  longer 
period  this  morning. 

I  would  have  been  satisfied  yesterday  with  the  amend 
ment  proposed  by  the  distinguished  gentleman  from  Mary 
land  [Mr.  F.  Thomas]  with  one  or  two  others.  To-day, 
hpwever,  this  will  not  satisfy  me.  Sir,  the  bill  should  be 
rejected.  It  is  false  in  principle  and  in  detail,  and  will 
materially  diminish  the  revenues  of  the  country  by  sus 
pending  several  important  branches  of  our  industry.  As 
I  conned  its  sections  I  became  doubtful  of  its  origin  ; 
whether  it  was  of  British  or  American  conception.  There 
are  many  of  its  features  which  constrain  me  to  think  that 
it  is  of  foreign  and  not  of  American  origin.  I  point,  gentle 
men,  to  the  ninth  section.  Its  authors  seem  to  have  been 
oblivious  to  the  fact  that  we  are  still  living  under  demo 
cratic-republican  institutions,  and  have  not  yet  fallen 
under  a  dictatorship.  The  ninth  section  confides  the 
regulation  of  all  the  commerce  that  may  grow  up  between 
the  United  States  and  the  British  Provinces  to  the  absolute 
and  unrestricted  control  of  the  President.  Let  me  astound 
gentlemen  who  have  not  examined  the  bill  by  reading 
that  portion  of  the  section  to  which  I  refer : 

85 


86  TRADE   WITH   BRITISH    AMERICA. 

"  SEC.  9.  And  be  it  further  enacted,  That  the. President  is  hereby 
authorized  to  terminate  or  suspend  the  provisions  of  this  act,  or  any 
section  or  sections  thereof,  and  as  to  the  whole  or  part  of  the  British 
North  American  colonies,  by  giving  public  notice  of  such  termina 
tion  or  suspension,  whenever  in  his  opinion  it  may  appear  just  and 
proper,  etc." 

Sir,  such  power  may  be  exercised  by  the  Emperor  of 
Russia  in  regard  to  the  commerce  of  his  empire ;  but  such 
power,  regulating  the  trade  of  this  country  according  to 
his  caprice,  has  never  been  confided  to  the  President  of 
the  United  States,  or  will  be  while  the  American  people 
remain  free. 

Mr.  Rogers.  Will  the  gentleman  allow  me  to  ask  him 
a  question? 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  would  rather  not  now.  The  gentleman 
knows  my  time  is  limited. 

Mr.  Rogers.  I  wanted  to  ask  the  gentleman  from  Penn 
sylvania  if  this  bill  gives  the  President  any  more  power 
than  was  proposed  to  be  given  to  him  by  the  Freedmen's 
Bureau  bill? 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  have  no  time  for  side  issues  now.  I  will 
answer  that  question  some  time  when  my  distinguished 
friend  has  the  floor  and  kindly  yields  to  me.  [Laughter.] 

Sir,  this  bill  is  of  a  piece  with  others  now  pending  before 
the  House.  It  is  like  the  loan  bill,  which  proposes  to 
contract  the  business  of  the  country  to  the  narrow  dimen 
sions  it  filled  before  the  war,  and  to  give  the  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury,  while  he  has  an  average  balance  of  $-±0,000, 
000  lying  on  deposit  in  the  banks,  the  power  to  control 
the  currency  of  the  country  by  contracting  or  expanding 
it  at  his  will.  It  is  also  in  this  respect  like  the  postal  bill, 
which,  as  an  inducement  to  the  people  to  buy  their  envel 
opes  from  Government  employes  or  contractors,  proposes 
to  give  one  free  of  cost  to  every  man  who  buys  a  postage 
stamp. 

Sir,  when  I  regard  these  features  of  the  bill,  I  feel  that 
its  paternity  may  have  been  American,  that  it  may  have 
emanated  from  the  Administration.  But  when  I  consider 
its  provisions  in  reference  to  trade,  and  see  how  well  they 
are  calculated  to  prostrate  many  of  the  leading  interests 
of  the  country;  the  advantages  it  secures  to  foreign  com 
modities  which  compete  with  the  productions  of  our 
laboring  people;  how  it  stimulates  the  development  of  the 
resources  of  the  British  Provinces,  and  induces  emigration 


TRADE   WITH   BRITISH   AMERICA.  87 

to  them,  while  it  restricts  the  development  of  our  resources, 
and  is  calculated  to  divert  immigration  from  our  shores : 
when  I  see  all  this,  I  say,  I  feel  that  the  Canadian  ministry 
must  have  concocted  this  bill. 

Mr.  Conkling.  I  would  like  to  ask  the  gentleman  from 
Pennsylvania  a  question  pertinent  to  what  he  is  now 
saying. 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  would  rather  not  yield  now,  having  just 
declined  to  yield  to  the  gentleman  from  New  Jersey 
[Mr.  Rogers]. 

I  know,  Mr.  Chairman,  how  hard  it  is  to  break  away 
from  habit,  to  escape  from  established  usage ;  and  I  re 
member  that  for  more  than  ten  years,  under  the  fraudu 
lently  named  reciprocity  treaty,  we  have  had  our  habits, 
usages,  and  modes  of  thought  controlled  by  the  infamous 
provisions  of  that  treaty;  and  it  may  be  that  this  influ 
ence  has  controlled  the  committee  that  presented  the  bill. 
But,  sir,  nothing  is  more  certain  than  that  had  we  never 
had  that  treaty  we  never  would  have  had  this  bill ;  it  is 
its  legitimate  offspring,  and  embodies  many  of  the  worst 
vices  of  its  parent. 

Sir,  what  was  that  treaty  ?  It  was  conceived  in  iniquity 
and  executed  in  sin.  It  was  one  of  the  master-strokes  of 
policy  of  the  sagacious  and  recklessly  ambitious  men  who 
had  even  then  determined  to  destroy  our  country.  Its 
object  was  to  enfeeble  and  impoverish  the  North,  and  to 
strengthen  the  Provinces  of  our  most  powerful  enemy, 
which  bound  the  whole  line  of  our  northern  frontier.  It 
was  the  result  of  a  deliberate  conspiracy,  the  first  object 
of  which  was  to  give  the  American  market  to  foreign 
manufacturers,  by  destroying  every  leading  branch  of 
American  manufactures;  and  the  second  was,  when  they 
had  attained  the  first,  to  prostrate  the  grain-growers  and 
provision-producers  of  the  West  and  North,  and  thus  re 
duce  the  impoverished  North  to  subjection  to  the  slave- 
holding  oligarchy  of  the  South.  Its  ultimate  purpose  was 
to  produce  bankruptcy  and  discord  in  the  North,  that  they 
might  more  easily  accomplish  their  then  purpose,  which 
they  expressed  by  open  war  in  April  1861. 

In  order  that  gentlemen  may  see  that  I  speak  by  the 
record,  I  send  to  the  Clerk's  desk  a  volume  bearing  the 
imprint  of  Prichard,  Abbott,  &  Loomis,  Augusta,  Georgia, 
1860,  and  entitled  "Cotton  is  King,  and  Pro  Slavery  Argu 
ments,  comprising  the  Writings  of  Hammond,  Harper, 


88  TRADE   WITH   BRITISH   AMERICA. 

Christie,  Stringfellow,  Hodge,  Bledsoe,  and  Cartwright,  on 
this  Important  Subject,  by  E.  N.  Elliott,  LL.D.,  president 
of  Planters'  College,  Mississippi,  with  an  Essay  on  Slavery 
in  the  Light  of  International  Law,  by  the  Editor." 

Let  one  of  these  distinguished  men  inform  the  country 
whether  I  am  correct  in  what  I  now  say. 

The  Clerk  read,  as  follows : 

"  Thus  also  was  a  tripartite  alliance  formed  by  which  the  western 
farmer,  the  southern  planter,  and  the  English  manufacturer  became 
united  in  a  common  bond  of  interest,  the  whole  giving  their  support 
to  the  doctrine  of  free  trade. 

"This  active  commerce  between  the  West  and  South  soon  caused 
a  rivalry  in  the  East,  that  pushed  forward  improvements  by  States 
or  corporations,  to  gain  a  share  in  the  western  trade.  These  im 
provements,  as  completed,  gave  to  the  West  a  choice  of  markets,  so 
that  its  farmers  could  elect  whether  to  feed  the  slave  who  grows  the 
cotton  or  the  operatives  who  are  engaged  in  its  manufacture.  But 
this  rivalry  did  more.  The  competition  for  western  products  en 
hanced  their  price  and  stimulated  their  more  extended  cultivation. 
This  required  an  enlargement  of  the  markets,  and  the  extension  of 
slavery  became  essential  to  western  prosperity. 

"  We  have  not  reached  the  end  of  the  alliance  between  the  west 
ern  farmer  and  southern  planter.  The  emigration  which  has  been 
filling  Iowa  and  Minnesota,  and  is  now  rolling  like  a  flood  into  Kan 
sas  and  Nebraska,  is  but  a  repetition  of  what  has  occurred  in  the 
other  western  States  and  Territories.  Agricultural  pursuits  are 
highly  remunerative ;  and  tens  of  thousands  of  men  of  moderate 
means  or  of  no  means  are  cheered  along  to  where  none  forbids  them 
land  to  till. 

"For  the  last  few  years  public  improvements  have  called  for 
vastly  more  than  the  usual  share  of  labor  and  augmented  the  con 
sumption  of  provisions.  The  foreign  demand  added  to  this  has  in 
creased  their  price  beyond  what  the  planter  can  afford  to  pay.  For 
many  years  free  labor  and  slave  labor  maintained  an  even  race  in 
their  western  progress.  Of  late  the  freemen  have  begun  to  lag  be 
hind,  while  slavery  has  advanced  by  several  degrees  of  longitude. 
Free  labor  must  be  made  to  keep  pace  with  it.  There  is  an  urgent 
necessity  for  this.  The  demand  for  cotton  is  increasing  in  a  ratio 
greater  than  can  be  supplied  by  the  American  planters,  unless  by  a 
corresponding  increased  production.  This  increasing  demand  must 
be  met,  or  its  cultivation  will  be  facilitated  elsewhere,  and  the  mon 
opoly  of  the  planter  in  the  European  markets  be  interrupted.  This 
can  only  be  effected  by  concentrating  the  greatest  possible  number 
of  slaves  upon  the  cotton  plantations.  Hence  they  must  be  sup 
plied  with  provisions. 

"  This  is  the  present  aspect  of  the  provision  question,  as  it  regards 
slavery  extension.  Prices  are  approximating  the  maximum  point, 
beyond  which  our  provisions  cannot  be  fed  to  slaves,  unless  there  is 
a  corresponding  increase  in  the  price  of  cotton.  Such  a  result  was 
not  anticipated  by  Southern  statesmen  when  they  had  succeeded  in 
overthrowing  the  protective  policy,  destroying  the  United  States 
Bank,  and  establishing  the  sub-Treasury  system.  And  why  has  this 


TRADE   WITH    BRITISH   AMERICA.  89 

occurred  ?  The  mines  of  California  prevented  both  the  free-trade 
tariff  (the  tariff  of  1846,  under  which  our  exports  are  now  made, 
approximates  the  free-trade  principles  very  closely)  and  the  sub- 
Treasury  scheme  from  exhausting  the  country  of  the  precious 
metals,  extinguishing  the  circulation  of  bank  notes,  and  reducing 
the  prices  of  agricultural  products  to  the  specie  value.  At  the 
date  of  the  passage  of  the  Nebraska  bill,  the  multiplication  of  pro 
visions  by  their  more  extended  cultivation  was  the  only  measure 
left  that  could  produce  a  reduction  of  prices  and  meet  the  wants  of 
the  planters.  The  Canadian  reciprocity  treaty,  since  secured,  will 
bring  the  products  of  the  British  North  American  colonies,  free  of 
duty,  into  competition  with  those  of  the  United  States  when  prices 
with  us  rule  high,  and  tend  to  diminish  their  cost." 

Mr.  Kelky.  Mr.  Chairman,  as  the  bill  before  the  House 
has,  in  my  judgment,  all  the  vices  of  that  treaty,  I  shall 
propose  the  following  as  a  substitute  for  it. 

The  Clerk  read,  as  follows : 

"  Strike  out  all  after  the  enacting  clause  and  insert  as  follows  : 
'•That  from  and  after  the  17th  of  March,  1866,  there  shall  be  levied, 
collected,  and  paid  on  all  articles  imported  from  her  Britannic 
Majesty's  possessions  in  North  America,  that  is  to  say,  from  Can 
ada,  New  Brunswick,  Nova  Scotia,  Newfoundland,  Prince  Edward's 
Island,  and  the  several  islands  thereunto  adjacent,  Hudson's  Bay  Ter 
ritory,  British  Columbia,  and  Vancouver's  Island,  the  same  duties 
and  rates  of  duties  which  are  now  imposed  by  law  on  like  articles 
imported  from  other  foreign  countries." 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  am  not  prepared  to  say  that  my  substi 
tute  contains  all  the  provisions  it  should  ;  that  it  may  not 
be  amended  with  advantage;  but  I  do  say  that  it  is  infi 
nitely  preferable,  for  every  leading  interest  of  the  country, 
to  the  bill  now  under  consideration. 

Why  should  we  have  a  special  tariff  law  for  the  British 
Provinces?  What  have  they  done  to  win  our  love? 
Why  should  we  sacrifice  our  interests  to  protect  or  ad 
vance  theirs  ? 

The  gentleman  from  Yermont  [Mr.  Morrill]  said  in 
the  course  of  his  remarks  that  we  should  not  base  our 
action  on  hatred  or  fear.  I  do  not  propose  to  base  any  of 
my  acts  in  this  House  upon  any  of  the  passions.  I  mean 
to  be  governed  by  cool  judgment. 

But,  sir,  I  remember  that  when  we  were  in  a  death  grap 
ple  with  our  insane  brethren  of  the  South,  the  people  of 
these  Provinces  smote  us  first  on  one  cheek  and  then  on 
the  other  ;  and  I  know,  sir,  if  we  were  prepared  to  for 
give  them  seven  times  seventy,  their  transgressions  against 


90  TRADE    WITH    BRITISH   AMERICA. 

us  had  exceeded  that  number  before  they  organized  a 
raiding  party  and  sent  it  into  the  gentleman's  own  State 
to  rob  the  banks  and  murder  the  citizens  who  attempted 
to  defend  them.  Backed  as  they  are  by  the  power  of 
England,  they  are  our  most  dangerous  enemies,  because 
they  are  our  nearest ;  and  I  do  not  find  it  laid  down  even 
in  the  Christian  code  of  morals  that  we  shall  injure  our 
selves  and  impoverish  our  families  and  country  to  benefit 
those  who  would  have  disseminated  poison  among  us,  who 
would  have  burned  our  cities  and  towns,  and  who  did  all 
that  the  devilish  ingenuity  of  the  madmen  of  the  South 
could  suggest  to  injure  us  and  destroy  our  country. 

They  are  foreigners  to  our  soil,  and  let  us  regard  them 
as  we  do  the  people  of  other  countries,  as  friends  in  peace 
and  enemies  in  war.  Let  us  legislate  for  them,  as  the 
substitute  I  have  submitted  proposes  to  do,  precisely  as 
we  do  for  the  rest  of  mankind.  I  can  understand,  sir,  in 
the  light  of  the  invaluable  book  from  which  I  have  had 
an  extract  read,  and  to  which  I  have  so  often  referred  in 
previous  discussions,  why  every  provision  of  the  so-called 
reciprocity  treaty  was  adverse  to  our  country.  Both  par 
ties  to  it  meant  mischief  to  us.  But  I  cannot  understand 
why  a  bill  should  be  reported  by  the  Committee  of  Ways 
and  Means  containing  so  many  of  its  worst  features,  and 
which  if  adopted,  would  inevitably  strike  down  several  of 
the  principal  or  leading  interests  of  our  country.  It  might 
well  be  entitled  a  bill  to  destroy  the  fisheries,  salt-works, 
and  lumber  trade  of  the  country,  and  to  prevent  the  work 
ing  of  bituminous  coal-beds  within  the  limits  of  the 
United  States,  east  of  the  summit  of  the  Alleghanies. 
Should  it  become  a  law  it  will  ruin  all  these  great  branches 
of  industry. 

The  gentleman  from  Yermont,  in  introducing  the  bill, 
said  with  great  plausibility — more  plausibility  than  can 
dor,  I  am  sorry  to  say  : 

"  Coal  is  a  raw  material,  and  for  every  ton  of  iron  made  at  least 
three  tons  of  bituminous  or  two  of  anthracite  coal  are  consumed. 
It  is  the  motive  power  of  railroads  and  steamboats  as  well  as  of 
manufacturing  establishments.  We  tax  iron  and  all  other  manu 
factures  when  produced  and  sold,  and  we  tax  railroads  and  steam 
boats  on  their  business.  Can  we  not  afford  to  have  our  coal  free  ? 
It  is,  too,  an  article  of  universal  consumption,  required  in  our  rigor 
ous  climate  in  large  quantities  by  those  unable  to  clothe  themselves 
in  heavy  and  abundant  woolens  or  thick  and  costly  furs  ;  by  the 
poor  as  well  as  the  rich.  There  are  hardly  more  reasons  for  a  tax 


TRADE   WITH   BRITISH   AMERICA.  91 

on  coal  than  upon  firewood.     In  addition  to  this,  our  own  coal-fields 
are  unsurpassed  in  extent  and  quality  by  any  in  the  world. 

"  But  our  export  to  the  Canadas  of  coal  from  Ohio,  Virginia,  and 
Pennsylvania  bids  fair  to  equal  in  amount  all  that  we  bring  from 
the  Provinces  ;  the  value  of  our  exports  in  1864  being  $555,332, 
and  that  of  our  imports  $883.805.  So  that  under  any  circumstances 
here  is  one  article  which  approaches  the  idea  of  reciprocity,  and  an 
interchange  effects  economy  in  long  lines  of  freight,  relieving  our 
selves  as  well  as  others  from  positive  loss." 

Carlyle  tells  us  that  nothing  lies  like  figures,  although 
the  general  proposition  is  that  figures  never  lie ;  and 
the  statement  just  quoted  is  as  plausibly  delusive  as  a 
statement  each  of  the  propositions  of  which  is  in  itself 
true  can  be. 

Sir,  is  chalk  cheese,  or  cheese  chalk  ?  In  speaking 
about  bituminous  and  anthracite  coal  we  speak  of  two 
distinct  articles,  as  unlike  as  cheese  and  chalk.  This  bill 
does  not  in  any  way,  or  by  any  possibility,  affect  either 
advantageously  or  disadvantageously  the  anthracite  coal 
trade  and  interests  of  the  country. 

Canada  must  have  our  anthracite  coal.  She  has  none 
of  it,  nor  can  she  obtain  it  elsewhere.  Our  Pennsylvania 
anthracite  coal-fields  are  a  God-given  monopoly,  as  are  the 
long-staple  cotton-fields  of  the  South.  Our  anthracite 
interest  asks  no  protection.  Indeed,  were  it  constitu 
tional  to  impose  an  export  duty  you  might  put  a  light 
one  on  anthracite  coal,  and  the  Canadas  would  still  buy 
it  from  us.  The  $555,332  worth  of  coal  exported  under 
the  treaty  in  1864  was  anthracite,  and  in  fact,  therefore, 
has  no  part  in  a  discussion  relating  as  this  does  to  the 
bituminous  coal  interests  of  the  country.  The  article 
bears  the  name  of  coal,  and  there  is  no  other  reason  why 
it  should  be  named  in  connection  with  this  bill. 

From  what  fields,  and  to  what  provincial  ports,  have 
we  exported  bituminous  coal  from  Ohio  ?  I  ask  the  well- 
informed  gentlemen  who  compose  the  Ohio  delegation  to 
tell  me  if  there  be  one  line  of  steamers,  or  any  other  kind 
of  boats,  employed  in  carrying  Ohio  coal  to  the  British 
Provinces.  Why,  sir,  they  could  not  sell  it  at  the  wharf 
in  any  provincial  town  for  its  cost.  Virginia  coal  go  to 
the  British  Provinces !  It  cannot,  in  the  nature  of  things, 
have  gone  there  save  as  a  curiosity  for  mineralogical  cab 
inets.  It  never  went  there  as  an  article  of  commerce. 

The  gist  of  the  gentleman's  argument  is  that  we  need 
cheap  coal.  Why,  then,  does  he  not  propose  to  take  the 


92  TRADE    WITH    BRITISH   AMERICA. 

duty  of  a  dollar  and  a  quarter  per  ton  off  British  coal,  so 
that  we  may  have  it  still  cheaper  ?  Where  is  his  logic  ? 

Mr.  Morrill.     Does  the  gentleman  desire  an  answer  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.     Yes,  sir. 

Mr.  Morrill.  Mr.  Chairman,  in  relation  to  this  subject 
of  coal,  I  confess  that  I  arn  not  clear  that  it  is  proper  to 
protect  it  at  all.  I  do  believe  that  it  is  one  of  those  arti 
cles  that  cannot  be  increased  by  protection,  and  if  it  is  so, 
the  whole  foundation  of  the  doctrine  drops  out,  in  my 
judgment.*  I  think,  as  I  stated  in  the  extracts  which  the 
gentleman  has  just  read,  that  it  is  so  nearly  allied  to  fire 
wood  that  it  deserves  perhaps  no  protection. 

And  while  I  am  up  allow  me  to  ask  the  gentleman  if  he 
has  any  statistics  to  show  that  this  coal  that  goes  to  Can 
ada  is  not  bituminous  coal.  Do  they  not  use  it  there  for 
the  purpose  of  making  gas  ?  Or  do  they  use  anthracite 
coal  throughout  the  Provinces  for  making  gas  ?  I  ask 
for  information. 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  will  answer  the  question  of  the  gentle 
man.  Some  small  quantity  of  Ohio  coal  may  have  gone 
there  for  experiment  in  gas  making,  or  occasionally  a  vessel 
may  have  carried  it  as  ballast  to  some  western  town.  It 
is  not  a  recognized  article  of  commerce,  and  there  is 
neither  an  organized  company  for  the  sale  or  carrying  of 
bituminous  coal  from  Ohio,  Virginia,  or  Pennsylvania,  to 
the  Canadas.  I  admit  that  there  may  be  special  cargoes 
shipped  for  gas  companies  in  some  extreme  western  parts 
of  Canada,  but  that  does  not  touch  the  argument.  But 
while  I  admit  the  fact,  for  the  argument's  sake,  I  must  say 
that  I  do  not  believe  it,  for  I  do  not  see  how  it  can  be 
true. 

*The  fallacy  of  the  theory  that  coal  "is  one  of  those  articles  that  can 
not  be  increased  by  protection,"  is  evident  from  the  rapid  increase  in  the 
production  of  bituminous  coal  for  consumption  upon  the  Atlantic  seaboard, 
which  has  been  accompanied  by  a  marked  decline  in  price  of  the  imported  arti 
cle  since  the  duty  of  $1.25  per  ton  upon  it  was  revived  by  the  expiration  of  the 
Reciprocity  Treaty  in  March,  1866  : 


Home  Production  of  Bituminous         Price 
Year.              Coal  for  consumption  on  the                 Co; 
Atlantic  Seaboard.                         Bosl 

1863  1.656.852  { 

of  Pict< 
il  delivi 
ion,  dul 

&  7.40 
10.40, 
9.60, 
8.54 
8.10 
8.16 
7.78, 
6.60 

;y  paid.                  Dnt- 
Free 
Free 
,  Free 
$1.25 
1.25 
1.25 
1.25 
1.25 

1864 

,  1,711,798           .              

1865  , 
1866  
1867  
1868  
1869  
1870... 

1,989,247  
2,482,932  
2,788,103  
3,308,655  
4,233,980  
4,168,470  

TRADE  WITH   BRITISH   AMERICA.  93 

The  gentleman  from  Yermont  says  the  production 
of  coal  cannot  be  increased.  Allow  me  to  say  that 
I  am  speaking  for  no  Pennsylvania  interest  to-day.  I 
am  speaking  for  poor,  wasted,  war  trampled  Virginia,  for 
Maryland,  West  Virginia,  Kentucky,  Tennessee,  and  Mis 
souri,  Georgia,  and  all  the  southern  States.  They  all  need 
our  fostering  care,  arid  have  inexhaustible  beds  of  bitumi 
nous  coal  that  ought  to  be  productive.  I  am  not  willing 
that  the  rebellious  people  of  the  South  shall  become  my 
political  master  or  equal  in  the  councils  of  the  nation  until 
they  are  politically  regenerated.  But  I  desire  to  develop 
their  natural  resources,  to  induce  capitalists,  laborers,  and 
men  of  enterprise  to  go  and  settle  among  them,  and  build 
up  industrious  and  peaceful  Commonwealths  in  the  hearts 
of  whose  people  loyalty  to  the  Union  shall  dwell.  It  is  in 
these  interests  that  I  speak.  The  bituminous  coal  interest 
of  eastern  Pennsylvania  is  comparatively  unimportant ;  but 
we  have  the  only  paying  bituminous  coal  company  east 
of  the  summit  of  the  Alleghany  mountains.  Thirty  odd 
millions  of  capital  have  already  been  invested  outside  of 
my  State  in  this  branch  of  the  coal  trade.  Thirty  millions 
more  have  been  invested  in  railroads  to  convey  the  coal  from 
the  mines  to  market,  and  though  it  is  all  unproductive,  or 
nearly  so,  the  owners  do  not  abandon  it  as  lost. 

They  hope  that  Congress,  impelled  by  a  sense  of  justice, 
or  the  pride  of  American  citizenship,  will  protect  them 
against  the  assaults  of  British  capital  and  ill-paid  labor. 
They  have  waited  in  hope  for  the  day  when  the  infamous 
treaty  which  blasted  their  prospects  should  be  annulled 
and  they  be  permitted  to  enjoy  equal  chances  with  for 
eigners  in  our  own  markets.  G  i ve  them  but  an  even  chance, 
burdened  as  they  are  by  our  war  taxes,  and  all  these  dead 
millions  will  become  productive.  I  challenge  any  mem 
ber  of  the  House  to  name  another  bituminous  coal  com 
pany  than  the  Westmoreland  Company  that  has  paid  or 
earned  a  dividend  in  the  last  three  years  on  the  eastern 
slope  of  the  mountains.  Give  them  protection  equal  to  the 
taxes,  direct  and  incidental,  which  you  impose  upon  them, 
and  you  will  find  that  instead  of  the  product  of  1867  being 
but  two  million  tons,  as  it  was  last  year,  its  increase  will 
show  that  we  can  produce  ninety-five  million  tons,  as  Eng 
land  did  in  that  same  year.  Our  fields  are  broader  and 
richer  than  hers  and  those  of  Nova  Scotia  combined.  They 
are  scattered  from  the  mountain  above  the  clouds,  on  the 


94  TRADE   WITH   BRITISH   AMERICA. 

brows  of  which  Hooker  and  his  brave  comrades  fought, 
eastward,  northward,  southward  and  westward  all  over  the 
country.  Give  our  miners  but  that  measure  of  protection, 
which,  under  the  weight  of  taxation  they  bear,  will  secure 
an  equal  chance  in  our  markets,  and  they  will  give  you  an 
adequate  supply  of  coal,  and  in  two  or  three  years  domes 
tic  competition,  while  it  will  by  patronizing  your  railroads 
and  carrying  companies  have  filled  your  Treasury  and  ena- 
oled  you  to  reduce  your  scale  of  taxation,  will  bring  down 
the  price  of  coal  in  all  our  markets. 

Pennsylvania,  I  repeat,  has  no  special  interest  in  this 
question.  Her  interest  is  that  the  general  prosperity  of 
the  country  shall  be  promoted.  We  want  you  manufac 
turers  of  New  England  to  clothe  the  men  who  dig  and 
handle  our  coal ;  we  want  you  men  of  the  Northwest  to 
feed  the  men  who  dig  and  handle  our  coal;  and  Pennsyl 
vania  will  rejoice  in  her  share  of  the  general  prosperity 
which  will  then  bless  our  country. 

Sir,  I  turn  to  the  fortieth  page  of  the  letter  of  the  Secre 
tary  of  the  Treasury,  embodying  the  report  of  the  revenue 
commissioners,  arid  find  that  in  the  fiscal  year  1865  there 
were  imported,  under  the  reciprocity  treaty,  13,025,432 
bushels,  being  465,194  tons  of  bituminous  coal,  free  of 
duty,  from  the  British  Provinces.  There  were  imported 
in  the  same  year,  paying  a  duty  of  $1  25  a  ton,  6,131,608 
bushels,  being  218,986  tons,  from  England.  There  were 
exported  of  domestic  production,  which,  as  I  have  said, 
was  all  or  nearly  all  anthracite,  3,708,264  bushels,  and 
there  were  exported  of  foreign  production  25,536  bushels, 
making  nearly  1000  tons. 

Sir,  will  it  be  said  that  the  vast  coal-beds  of  this  coun 
try  cannot  supply  our  wants,  and  that  we  cannot  increase 
our  production?  Or  will  any  gentleman  say  that  a  duty 
of  fifty  cents  is  enough  to  protect  these  embarrassed  but 
important  interests?  I  ask  gentlemen  to  mark  the  fact, 
that  though  465,194  tons  came  in  under  the  reciprocity 
treaty,  free  of  duty,  from  her  Provinces,  England  was  still 
able  to  send  in,  and  pay  $1  25  duty  per  ton,  the  enormous 
amount  of  218,986  tons.  Is  it  not  apparent  from  these 
facts  that  we  will  bankrupt  every  bituminous  coal  com 
pany  in  the  country  if  we  pass  this  bill  ? 

Do  gentlemen  say  our  demands  in  this  behalf  are  exor 
bitant,  or  ask  why  our  coal  cannot  be  sold  cheaply  as  that 
of  England  and  the  Provinces  ?  I  answer  them  in  part  by 


TRADE   WITH   BRITISH   AMERICA.  95 

another  question,  which  is,  do  they  wish  the  American 
miner  to  toil  for  the  wages  given  to  laborers  in  English 
collieries?  Sir,  the  heartlessness  of  the  capitalists  of  En 
gland  was  never  more  fully  exposed  than  by  the  report  of 
the  parliamentary  commission  appointed  to  inquire  into 
the  condition  of  the  mining  population  of  the  country  * 
England's  shame  is  nowhere  written  in  broader  or  darker 
colors  than  in  that  report,  and  I  will  not  permit  myself  to 
believe  that  any  member  of  this  House  is  anxious  that  we 
should  emulate  that  page  of  her  history. 

Our  better  wages  for  labor  and  our  heavy  war  taxes 
answer  the  suggestion  thrown  out.  How  much  England 
and  her  American  Provinces  did  to  protract  and  aggravate 
the  war  is  known  to  all,  and  I  am  not  willing  they  should 
derive  advantage  from  their  treachery.  On  this  subject 
I  quote  a  few  lines  of  a  letter  from  an  intelligent  coal 
operator : 

"  It  is  almost  impossible  to  compute  precisely  the  amount  of 
revenue  that  Government  reaps  from  a  ton  of  bituminous  coal,  but 
the  fairest  way  to  get  at  it  will  be  to  take  the  cost  of  putting  the 
article  on  board  a  vessel  before  the  war,  (or  in  I860,)  $3  50  per  ton, 
as  compared  with  the  present  cost,  seven  dollars  per  ton,  making1  an 
increase  in  the  actual  cost  of  $3  50  per  ton.  This  increase  is  in  the 
main  occasioned  by  the  taxes  which  have  been  levied  in  order  to 
support  the  Government,  (which  we  pay  cheerfully  ;)  and  they  touch 
every  article  of  provisions  and  repairs  about  the  mines  and  railroads, 
as  well  as  the  two  and  a  half  per  cent,  upon  the  gross  rate  of  trans 
portation  and  five  per  cent,  upon  the  net  earnings  of  the  carrying 
companies,  which,  when  all  summed  together,  amount  to  very 
nearly  if  not  quite  three  dollars  per  ton." 

Sir,  we  are  in  a  transition  age;  and  here  I  reply  fur 
ther  to  the  remark  of  the  gentleman  from  Vermont  that 
coal  ought  not  to  be  protected.  We  are  in  a  transition 
age  in  more  senses  than  one.  We  are  passing  from  war 
to  peace  and  from  the  age  of  iron  to  the  age  of  steel.  In 
a  few  years,  if  we  foster  our  industry,  steel  will  supplant 
iron  in  almost  all  the  uses  to  which  it  is  now  applied. 
Sir,  coal  and  iron  are  the  muscles  of  modern  civilization ; 
arid  fire — ignited  coal — is  the  material  force  that  is  impel 
ling  us  onward  and  upward.  Had  the  southern  States  had 
equal  mastery  with  us  of  these  elements,  I  doubt  whether 
we  would  yet  have  made  conquest  over  them.  I  query 

*  "  Though  England  is  deafened  with  spinning-wheels,  her  people  have  not 
clothes,-  though  she  is  black  with  digging  of  fuel,  they  die  of  cold  j  and  though 
ahe  has  sold  her  soul  for  grain,  they  die  of  hunger." — Ruakin. 


96  TRADE   WITH   BRITISH   AMERICA. 

whether  the  result  might  not  have  been  otherwise  than  it 
was.  What  were  Vulcan  and  the  Cyclops  to  an  American 
mechanic  handling  a  steam  engine  or  a  trip-hammer  ? 
We  live  in  a  new  age.  Old  mythologies  and  traditions 
serve  but  to  hamper  us.  We  must  adapt  ourselves  to  the 
agencies  by  which  we  are  surrounded  and  the  exigencies 
in  which  we  are  involved. 

Sir,  when  the  consular  wreath  first  graced  the  brow  of 
Napoleon  he  had  only  conquered  Italy,  which  in  the 
somewhat  boastful  language  of  the  historian,  extended 
"from  the  Alps  to  the  Papal  dominions."  And  what  had 
he  done  ?  Why,  sir,  all  that  Italy  which  he  had  conquered, 
could  it  be  lifted  bodily,  could  be  set  down  comfortably 
within  the  limits  of  the  State  of  Maine  or  of  South  Caro 
lina.  He  had  never  then  commanded  so  many  men  as 
Burnside  marched  through  the  city  of  Washington  when 
taking  his  single  corps  to  swell  the  grand  army  of  Lieu 
tenant  General  Grant  in  the  Wilderness.  How  was  it  that 
we  could  move  such  masses  of  men,  fight  this  war  over  the 
broadest  theatre  of  international  or  civil  war  known  to 
history,  and  conclude  it  in  little  more  than  four  years  ? 
It  was  because  we  used  coal  and  iron  as  our  muscles,  and 
fire — ignited  coal — as  our  force.  These  gave  us  New  Or 
leans,  and  battered  down  Fort  Fisher.  And  I  may  add 
that,  had  there  been  a  well-stocked  railroad  from  Mos 
cow  to  the  Rhine,  Napoleon's  retreat  would  have  been 
marked  by  fewer  horrors,  and  the  history  of  the  nine 
teenth  century  would  not  probably  have  read  as  it  does. 

And  if  the  chairman  of  the  Committee  of  Ways  "and 
Means  desires  to  secure  us  a  respectable  position  among 
the  nations,  he  will  not  strike  down,  disparage,  or  neglect 
the  coal  and  iron  interests  of  the  country,  to  subserve  any 
interest  of  his  State,  or  section.  They  are  the  primordial 
elements  of  our  greatness,  and  should  be  cherished  above 
all  others.  Look  at  their  power.  Behold  a  woman  with 
an  iron  machine  moving  noiselessly  before  her;  it  is  im 
pelled  by  coal  and  iron  fashioned  into  an  engine,  and  is 
doing  more  work  in  one  day  than  one  hundred  such 
women  could  have  done  in  a  week  one  century  ago.  Or 
see  yonder  pallid  little  girl  attending  such  a  machine  ;  she 
will  produce  results  in  one  day  that  would  have  taxed  the 
industry  of  her  grandmother  for  years.  The  power  of 
these  delicate  people  is  not  superhuman;  it  is  coal  and 
iron  that  produce  these  more  than  magical  results. 


TRADE   WITH    BRITISH   AMERICA.  97 

The  gentleman  doubts  whether  the  production  of  coal 
can  or  should  be  stimulated,  and  is  willing  we  should 
depend  on  our  most  powerful  and  our  nearest  enemies  for 
this  elemental  substance.  The  country  will  not  respond 
to  such  purblind  patriotism.  And  the  passage  of  this  bill 
will  reduce  us  to  such  abject  dependence. 

In  eleven  months  of  1865 — 1  do  not  go  back  to  1864, 
but  take  the  first  eleven  months  of  1865,  of  last  year — 
sixty -six  per  cent,  of  the  bituminous  coal  consumed  in  the 
States  east  of  Pennsylvania  was  mined  by  the  laborers  of 
Britain  or  of  the  British  Provinces.  Let  me  prove  this. 
The  amount  of  bituminous  coal  received  at  Boston  and 
New  York  from  the  British  Provinces,  free  of  duty,  to 
the  1st  of  December,  1865,  was  392,158  tons.  The  amount 
of  English  coal  received  at  the  same  points  during  the 
same  period,  which  paid  a  tax  of  §1  25  per  ton,  was  103,- 
723  ;  total  foreign  coal,  495,891  tons.  The  amount  of  coal 
produced  in  the  United  States,  delivered  during  the  same 
period  at  the  same  points,  was  but  287,874  tons ;  balance 
in  favor  of  foreign  coal,  208,  874  tons — one  coal  company 
in  the  British  Provinces  declaring  dividends  of  one  hun 
dred  and  seventy -'five  per  cent,  in  a  year,  and  but  one  of 
the  hundreds  of  companies  in  oar  country  being  able  to  de 
clare  a  dividend  of  one  per  cent.,  making  a  contrast  so  unfa 
vorable  to  us  that  many  of  our  enterprising  people,  as  was 
shown  yesterday  by  the  gentleman  from  Maryland,  [Mr.  F. 
Thomas,]  abandoned  their  country  and  embarked  their 
capital  in  the  coal  regions  of  Nova  Scotia.  Can  we 
strengthen  our  country  by  exporting  enterprise,  industry, 
and  capital  ? 

And  is  it  not  marvelous  that  such  an  exhibit  against  us 
can  be  made,  in  view  of  the  facts  that  our  bituminous  coal 
fields  are  so  much  broader  and  richer  than  those  of  En 
gland  and  Nova  Scotia  combined,  and  that  we  depend  for 
the  support  of  our  Government  and  its  credit  upon  taxes 
derived  in  great  part  from  the  forge,  the  furnace,  the  foun- 
dery,  the  railroad,  the  machine  shop,  the  coal-bed,  and  iron 
mine?  Are  gentlemen  willing  to  perpetuate  the  malign 
influence  that  has  produced  a  state  of  facts  so  disparaging 
to  our  intelligence,  patriotism,  and  interests?  No;  I  be 
lieve  they  will  agree  with  me  that  the  time  has  arrived 
when  we  should  develop  our  own  resources,  foster  Ameri 
can  labor,  and  guard  our  own  interests.  One  effect  of  the 
reciprocity  treaty  has  been  to  send  to  Canada  one  million 


98  TRADE   WITH    BRITISH   AMERICA. 

five  hundred  thousand  immigrants  who,  but  for  the  advan 
tages  it  gave  the  Provinces  over  us,  would  have  swelled 
our  population.  Let  us  now,  by  taking  care  of  our  own 
people,  induce  them  to  come  and  share  our  burdens  and 
blessings.* 

Sir,  I  have  said  that  I  would  not  legislate  with  reference 
to  the  Provinces  under  the  influence  of  fear  or  hate.  It 
would  indeed  be  unwise,  for  these  people  will  yet  be  our 
countrymen.  When  British  free  trade,  by  preventing  the 
people  of  the  British  Provinces  from  diversifying  their  in- 
dustries,  shall  have  impoverished  their  soil  and  repelled  im 
migration  from  their  shores ;  when  that  system  of  trade 
which  keeps  those  upon  whom  it  is  inflicted  at  hard  labor 
in  the  production  of  white  crops,  has  impoverished  their 
fields  as  it  has  those  of  our  old  States,  and  reduced  them  to 
oft-recurring  bankruptcy,  as  it  inevitably  must ;  and  when 
adequate  protection  to  our  labor  shall  have  developed  our 
boundless  resources,  and  generous  wages  invited  to  our 
shores  the  skilled  laborers  of  the  world,  the  contrast  be 
tween  our  condition  and  that  of  the  people  of  the  Provin 
ces  will  impel  them  to  unite  their  destiny  with  ours,  and 
I  will  be  ready  to  greet  them  cordially  as  compatriots. 

Sir,  what  do  we  get  in  return  for  the  immeasurable  de 
gradation  proposed  by  this  bill  ?  "Why,  sir,  we  get  the 
right  to  navigate  the  St.  Lawrence  and  to  patronize  the 
canals  and  railroads  of  Canada,  and  the  right  to  cut  lumber 
— mark  you,  "  the  right  to  cut  lumber  or  timber  of  any 
kind  on  that  portion  of  the  American  territory  in  the  State 
of  Maine  watered  by  the  river  St.  John  and  its  tributaries, 
and  when  floated  down  that  river  to  the  sea  to  ship  the 
same  to  the  United  States  from  the  Province  of  New 
Brunswick  without  any  export  duty  or  other  duty."  I 
take  it,  sir,  that  these  rights  will  not  be  long  withheld 
from  us,  even  if  we  determine  to  give  the  American  miner 
a  fair  field  in  which  to  compete  with  those  of  England 
and  her  Provinces. 

Let  me  pause  for  a  moment  to  say  to  the  gentleman 
that  his  statement  of  the  amount  of  coal  imported  and 
exported  is  more  plausible  than  candid  in  a  respect  not 
yet  noticed.  It  is  appraised  at  ad  valorem  prices,  which 
are  specie  prices  in  the  land  from  which  it  is  exported ; 
while  ours  is  calculated  at  currency  prices.  This  fact  must 

*  Since  the  repeal  of  the  Reciprocity  Treaty,  there  has  been  a  large  annual 
immigration  of  Canadians  to  the  United  States. 


TRADE    WITH   BRITISH    AMERICA.  99 

be  borne  in  mind  in  making  the  calculations  of  relative 
quantities. 

But  to  resume  and  conclude.  Sir,  to  get  these  rights  we 
give  precisely  the  same  rights  in  larger  degree  and  with 
greater  advantage  to  the  British  colonists.  We  will  there 
fore  get  them  without  this  bill.  I  do  not  wish  to  acquire 
them  by  ijorce.  I  am  anxious  to  see  them  granted  recipro 
cally  by  our  country  and  the  Provinces;  but  not  as  this 
bill  does  it. 

It  can  be  done  by  treaty  or  by  act  of  Congress ;  but  be 
that  as  it  may,  do  not  let  us  agree  to  destroy  the  fisheries 
of  New  England,  the  salt-works  of  West  Virginia,  Michi 
gan,  and  Louisiana,  the  lumber  business  of  the  Northwest 
and  of  Maine,  and  the  bituminous  coal-works  of  the  whole 
country,  as  the  price  of  the  privilege  of  yielding  more 
specifically  and  in  kind  than  we  get. 

No,  sir;  let  us  maintain  our  rights,  our  interests,  and 
our  country's  dignity.  Let  us  go  on  our  way  as  though 
there  were  no  British  Provinces ;  and  the  mere  action  of 
British  legislation,  constraining  their  people,  as  I  have 
already  said,  to  unrequited  agricultural  labor,  will  make 
them  sigh  for  our  prosperity.  And  then  we  shall  find 
that  the  American  Constitution  is  as  elastic  as  it  is  grand 
and  enduring.  It  has  expanded  to  embrace  immense  tracts 
of  territory.  Our  flag  has  swept  from  the  limits  of  the  o*i- 
ginal  thirteen  States  to  the  Pacific,  and  southward  to  the 
Kio  Grande ;  and,  sir,  when  the  people  of  Canada  shall,  as 
they  will  if  we  protect  our  labor,  ask  to  unite  their  destin 
ies  with  ours,  the  world  will  receive  additional  proof  that, 
when  Providence  impelled  our  fathers  to  the  creation  of 
our  Government,  it  gave  them  the  wisdom  to  bless  us  with 
a  Constitution  which  is  the  fit  canopy  of  a  continent,  and 
will  yet  crown  one. 


HOW  AND   WHEN    OUK   WAR    DEBT   CAN- 
BE   PAID. 

SPEECH  DELIVEEED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
JANUARY  3,  1867. 

The  House  being  in  the  Committee  of  the  Whole  on  the  state  of 
the  Union — 

Mr.  Kelley  said : 

Mr.  Chairman :  Within  an  hour  of  the  opening  of  the 
present  session  I  introduced  the  following  resolution, 
which  was  adopted  without  dissent : 

"  That  the  Committee  of  Ways  and  Means  be  instructed  to  in 
quire  into  the  expediency  of  immediately  repealing  the  provisions 
of  the  internal  revenue  law  whereby  a  tax  of  five  per  cent,  is  im 
posed  on  the  products  of  the  mechanical  and  manufacturing  indus 
try  of  the  country." 


On  the  succeeding  Monday,  having  in  the  meantime 
examined  the  report  of  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  I 
submitted  the  following : 

"  Resolved.  That  the  proposition  that  the  war  debt  of  the  country 
should  be  extinguished  by  the  generation  that  contracted  it  is  not 
sanctioned  by  sound  principles  of  national  economy,  and  does  not 
meet  the  approval  of  this  House."  *m»* 

I  hoped  that  this  resolution  would  also  receive  the  im 
mediate  assent  of  the  House,  but  it  was  thought  proper  to 
refer  it  to  the  Committee  of  Ways  and  Means.  I  am,  how 
ever,  not  without  an  assured  hope  that  with  the  sanction 
of  that  committee  it  will  at  an  early  day  meet  the  approval 
of  the  House  and  relieve  the  country  from  the  profound 
anxiety  and  depression  created  by  the  unprecedented  pro 
positions  of  the  Secretary.  With  these  resolutions  in 
view  I  propose,  Mr.  Chairman,  to  detain  the  committee  for 
a  little  while  by  an  examination  of  that  budget  of  inapti 
tudes,  incongruities,  and  non  stquiturs — the  report  of  the 
Secretary  of  the  Treasury. 
100 


HOW   OUR   WAR   DEBT   CAX   BE   PAID.  101 

This  report  is  indeed  a  noticeable  document.  It  abounds 
in  phrases  and  propositions  of  doubtful  meaning ;  its  ab 
stract  propositions,  many  of  which  as  mere  abstractions 
are  true,  and  should  be  considered  by  the  founder  of  r» 
new  and  independent  community,  are  not  only  inapplica 
ble  to,  but  are  contravened  by  the  inexorable  peculiari 
ties  of  our  condition ;  its  abounding  facts  do  not  sustain 
but  with  emphasis  gainsay  the  conclusions  they  are  mar 
shaled  to  support ;  and  the  means  by  which  it  proposes  to 
return  to  specie  payments  and  extinguish  the  national 
debt  within  given  periods  would,  by  virtue  of  laws  as 
fixed  as  that  of  gravitation,  produce  bankruptcy,  indi 
vidual,  corporate,  State,  and  national,  and  postpone  the  per 
manent  resumption  of  specie  payments  for  a  quarter  of  a 
century.  There  is  nothing  in  this  report  to  gratify  one's 
national  pride.  As  we  read  it  we  seek  excuses  for  its 
author,  and  hope  we  may  be  able  to  say  for  him  that 
he  confided  its  preparation  to  a  subordinate  who  dealt  un 
fairly  by  him.  It  may,  however,  be  that  Mr.  McCulloch, 
like  an  oarsman,  rowed  one  way  and  looked  another,  and 
was  too  modest  to  announce  his  real  purpose.  He  may 
have  improved  the  occasion  to  repair  a  neglect  in  the  edu 
cation  of  the  people ;  for  Rev.  Mr.  Nasby  tells  us  that  the 
Secretary  was  present  at  the  Cabinet  meeting  convened  to 
consider  the  "onparallelled  loosenin  uv  the  Nashnel- 
Union-Johnson-Dimekratic  party  in  the  various  States 
wich  held  elections  on  the  9th  uv  October  last,"  and  that 
he  attributed  it  "  to  the  limited  knowledge  the  masses  hed 
uv  'Ingeany  bankin/"  But,  be  this  as  it  may,  I  am  sure 
the  country  will  sustain  the  assertion  that  whatever  com 
mendation  the  report  may  deserve  or  receive  from  "In 
geany  "  or  other  bankers,  it  is  marked  by  no  sugges 
tion  adapted  to  the  existing  exigencies  of  our  country. 

The  Secretary's  wisdom  is  that  of  a  man  owning  a 
thousand  fertile  acres,  who  by  the  aid  of  a  loan  on  mort 
gage  had  fenced  them  in  and  built  barns  and  all  requisite 
outbuildings,  and  gathered  live  stock  and  the  many  im 
plements  by  which  genius  has  lightened  the  labors  and 
increased  the  profits  of  the  farmer,  and  who  withal  had 
able-bodied  sons  to  share  his  labors,  and  was  by  aid  of 
these  accumulating  a  fund  with  which  in  a  few  years  he 
could  extinguish  his  indebtedness;  but  who  when  afire 
consumed  his  barns  and  implements  and  choice  stock, 
would  not  use  his  savings  to  renew  his  stock  and  irnple- 


102  HOW    OUR   WAR    DEBT   CAN    BE   PAID. 

ments,  but  though  his  creditor  was  not  anxious  for  his 
money,  would  sell  his  interest-bearing  bonds  and  hand 
over  the  proceeds,  his  working  capital,  as  part  payment 
of  the  mortgage  debt. 

He  who  under  such  circumstances  would  come  to  such  a 
conclusion  and  execute  it,  would  find  but  little  sympathy 
among  his  neighbors.  Eager  as  they  might  be  to  repair 
his  losses,  they  would  not  be  likely  to  make  him  county 
treasurer  or  confide  the  township  funds  to  his  administra 
tion.  They  would  probably  deem  him  inadequate  to  the 
management  of  his  own  property,  and  feel  that  their 
neighborhood  was  well  rid  of  one  who  could  thus  stupidly 
sacrifice  his  resources  and  doom  his  sons  to  idleness  or  to 
earn  laborers'  wages  on  the  land  of  strangers.  Yet,  dis 
avowing  all  disposition  to  exaggeration  or  caricature,  I 
present  such  an  one  as  the  prototype  of  our  Finance 
Minister,  as  he  discloses  himself  in  this  report. 

Witness  the  exultation  with  which  he  announces  that 
during  the  brief  period  of  fourteen  months,  namely,  from 
August  31st,  1865,  to  October  31st,  1866,  the  principal  of 
our  debt  was  reduced  $206,379,565.71.  I  wonder  whether 
in  his  exultation  Mr.  McCulloch  remembered  that  this 
immense  sum  of  more  than  $206,000,000  had  been  added 
to  the  cost  and  market  price  of  the  product  of  but  four 
teen  months  of  American  labor,  and  that  by  its  addition 
to  the  cost  and  price  of  our  home  productions  those  of 
the  underpaid  labor  of  Europe  had  been  given  the  advan 
tage  over  the  American  laborer,  in  our  own  markets  and 
those  of  the  world.  I  wonder  whether  in  his  pride  he 
perceived  that  he  was  announcing  the  needless  abstraction 
of  more  than  two  hundred  and  six  millions  of  active 
working  capital  from  the  business  men  of  this  country, 
many  of  whom  were  struggling  to  maintain  infant  indus 
tries  which  had  been  called  into  existence  by  the  war  and 
needed  the  fostering  care  of  the  Government  to  give  them 
prosperity  and  permanence.  Unfamiliar  as  he  appears  to 
be  with  the  laws  of  social  science  and  the  history  of  their 
development,  it  is  possible  that  he  did  not  know  the  ad 
vantage  he  was  giving  to  British  monopoly  over  compet 
ing  American  enterprise  and  industry  by  recommending 
the  continuance  of  the  excessive  taxation  which  enabled 
him  to  pay  those  hundreds  of  millions.  England  is  the 
foe  of  the  laborer  in  every  land.  To  maintain  her  mono 
poly  she  must  undersell  other  nations  in  their  own  mar- 


HOW   OUP.   WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID.  103 

kets,  and  to  effect  this  must  depress  the  wages  of  labor  to 
the  lowest  possible  point  and  use  shoddy  or  other  base 
material  whenever  it  can  be  done  without  immediate  de 
tection.  Her  capitalists  are,  we  are  assured,  accumulating 
£100,000,000  or  $500,000,000  surplus  capital  per  annum  ; 
and  for  more  than  a  century  it  has  been  their  policy  to 
apply  a  portion  of  this  surplus  to  the  destruction  of  the 
industries  of  other  nations  by  underselling  them,  though 
for  a  time  it  involved  loss  on  certain  kinds  of  goods.  We 
have  often  been  the  victims  of  this  unscrupulous  policy, 
and  if  the  suggestions  of  the  Secretary  prevail  it  will 
again  prostrate  us. 

The  war  of  1812  developed  our  productive  power  very 
considerably;  but  in  two  years  after  the  war  closed  the 
capitalists  of  England,  by  the  express  advice  of  her  lead 
ing  statesmen,  and  in  pursuance  of  a  deliberate  combina 
tion,  swept  our  young  manufactures  out  of  existence.  In 
the  course  of  a  speech  in  Parliament  in  1815,  Henry 
•Brougham,  exulting  over  our  wide-spread  bankruptcy, 
said : 

"  It  is  well  worth  while  to  incur  a  loss  upon  the  first  exportation, 
in  order  by  the  glut  to  stifle  in  the  cradle  those  rising  manufactures 
in  the  United  States  which  the  war  has  forced  into  existence." 

History,  so  far  as  that  chapter  is  concerned,  is  repeating 
itself,  and  our  market  is  glutted  with  British  woolen  goods 
which  until  our  factories  shall  discharge  their  work-peo 
ple  and  suspend  operations  will  be  sold  at  less  than  cost. 
The  assessment  of  extraordinary  taxes  for  the  extinguish 
ment  of  the  war  debt  while  such  a  contest  is  waging  will 
make  the  victory  of  our  enemy  an  easy  one*  The  policy 
is  suicidal,  and  will  prove  fatal  to  our  revenues  by  paraly- 

*  English  manufacturers  are  beginning  to  discover  that  the  internal  taxes  to 
which  free  trade  subjects  them,  operate  as  a  bonus  to  their  foreign  competitors. 
Wm.  Hoyle,  a  cotton  manufacturer,  recently  published  a  work  entitled,  Our  Na- 
tionnl  Resources,  and  How  they  are  Wasted.  It  ran  quickly  to  a  fourth  edition, 
on  the  88th  page  of  which  I  find  the  following  : 

"  I  have  often  heard  it  stated,  and  there  is  considerable  truth  in  the  statement, 
that,  owing  to  the  heavy  local  taxation  in  Manchester,  and  other  large  towns, 
spinners  and  manufacturers  find  it  impossible  to  compete  with  country  mills, 
where  the  taxation  is  lighter ;  and  hence  it  is  observed  that,  whilst  no  new  mills 
are  being  built  in  Manchester,  old  ones  are  being  stopped,  and  the  trade  is  grad 
ually  shifting  to  more  lightly  taxed  regions. 

"  What  is  true  of  different  districts  in  the  same  country,  is  equally  true  of  dif 
ferent  countries;  the  rates  which  a  manufacturer  has  to  pay  must  come  out  of 
trade  profits,  which  makes  the  production  of  goods  more  expensive;  and,  conse 
quently,  other  things  being  equal,  if  a  large  mill  is  taxed  at  the  rate  of  £500  per 
annum  in  this  country,  but  only  £100  on  the  Continent,  the  Continental  manu 
facturer  has  the  advantage  of  £400  per  annum  over  his  English  competitor/ 


104  HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAN  BE   PAID. 

zing  the  productive  power  of  the  country  and  diminish 
ing  the  ability  of  the  people  to  consume  either  dutiable 
or  taxable  commodities.  This  is  not  the  language  of 
declamation.  It  has  high  official  sanction,  among  which 
is  that  of  the  revenue  commission  appointed  by  the  Secre 
tary  himself,  as  appears  by  the  following  extract  embodied 
in  the  last  annual  report  of  the  secretary  of  the  National 
Association  of  Wool-Growers. 

Before  presenting  this  extract  I  should  remark  that  the 
tax  on  manufactures  has  been  reduced  from  six  to  five  per 
cent,  since  the  preparation  of  the  official  reports  to  which 
it  refers : 

"  The  internal  revenue  tax  paid  in  the  year  1865  upon  '  woolen 
fabrics  and  all  manufactures  of  wool '  amounted  to  $7,947,094,  being 
3.79  per  cent,  upon  the  whole  of  the  internal  revenue  collected.  How 
heavily  this  tax  bears  upon  our  manufactures  is  shown  by  facts  pre 
sented  in  the  report  of  the  secretary  of  the  State  of  Massachusetts 
upon  the  industrial  statistics  of  the  State  for  the  year  1865.  The 
capital  invested  in  woolens  proper  is  shown  to  have  been  $14,775,- 
830,  and  the  value  of  the  woolen  product  to  have  been  $48,430,671. 
Six  per  cent,  upon  the  latter  sum,  the  amount  of  the  revenue  tax, 
is  $2,905,846,  being  19.66  per  cent,  or  in  round  numbers  20  per  cent, 
upon  the  capital  invested  in  woolens.  This  tax  has  been  paid  cheer 
fully  under  the  impulses  of  patriotism.  But  it  cannot  be  borne 
long.  In  the  language  of  one  of  the  special  reports  of  the  revenue 
commission,  '  It  has  no  parallel,  probably,  in  the  fiscal  regulations 
of  any  civilized  nation.  It  would  utterly  destroy  in  ten  years  two- 
thirds  of  the  various  kinds  of  production  subject  to  its  operations.'  " 

Gentlemen  will  not  fail  to  observe  how  perfectly  the 
views  of  the  commission  are  supported  by  the  facts  above 
cited  in  relation  to  the  woolen  manufacturers  of  Massa 
chusetts.  But  I  recur  to  the  report  of  the  commission: 

"  A  very  large  proportion  of  the  manufacturing  establishments 
in  the  United  States  sell  products  yearly  to  two  or  three  times  the 
amount  of  their  invested  capital ;  and  in  many  departments  of 
production  their  sales  yearly  amount  to  more  than  three  times  the 
cost  of  their  establishments.  If  the  capital  invested  be  $100,000 
the  sales  may  amount  to  two  or  three  hundred  thousand  dollars, 
and  the  tax  on  that  business  will  range  from  twelve  to  eighteen 
thousand  dollars  ;  that  is,  from  twelve  to  eighteen  per  cent,  on  the 
cost  of  the  manufacturing  establishment." 

And  again: 

"In  every  point  of  view  in  which  it  is  presented  it  seems  clear 
that  the  six  per  cent,  tax  upon  manufactures  will  destroy  productive 
power  in  a  increasing  progression ;  that  it  will  in  a  few  years,  if  not 
removed,  furnish  a  sad  monument  to  perpetuate  the  memory  of  a 
great  mistake." 


HOW   OUE  WAR   DEBT  CAN   BE   PAID.  105 

The  Secretary's  time  and  attention  have  probably  been 
so  absorbed  by  his  offical  guillotine  that  he  has  not  been 
able  to  examine  the  reports  submitted  to  him  by  the  re 
venue  commission.  I  will,  in  the  hope  of  bringing  them 
to  his  attention,  add  to  the  foregoing  the  following  brief 
extract  from  their  preliminary  report  of  last  year,  submit 
ted  to  him  by  Mr.  Commissioner  Wells : 

"  The  remedy,  therefore,  for  the  difficulties  above  pointed  out  and 
illustrated,  save  in  a  few  striking  instances  which  have  probably  re 
sulted  from  oversight  in  the  framing  of  the  law,  must,  in  the  opin 
ion  of  the  commission,  be  sought  for  in  such  a  revision  of  the  pre 
sent  internal  revenue  system  as  will  look  to  an  entire  exemption  of 
the  manufacturing  industry  of  the  United  States  from  all  direct 
taxation  (distilled  and  fermented  liquors,  tobacco,  and  possibly  a 
few  other  articles  excepted).  This  the  commissioners  are  unhesi 
tatingly  prepared  to  recommend."  * 

These  grave  considerations,  though  specially  reported 
to  him  by  his  own  agents,  do  not  seem  to  have  attracted 
the  attention  of  Mr.  McCulloch ;  for  while  exulting  over 
the  rapid  payment  of  the  debt,  without  seeming  to  detect 
the  cause  of  the  popular  emotion,  he  says  : 

"  Nothing  in  our  history  has  created  so  much  surprise,  both  at 
home  and  abroad,  as  the  reduction  of  our  national  debt.  The  won 
der  excited  by  the  rapidity  with  which  it  was  created  is  exceeded  by 
the  admiration  of  the  resolution  of  the  tax-payers  themselves  that 
it  shall  be  speedily  extinguished." 

It  is  true,  Mr.  Chairman,  that  surprise  and  wonder  agi 
tate  the  practical  men  of  the  country.  These  emotions 
are  not,  however,  excited  by  the  fact  that  we  were  able  to 
bear  extraordinary  taxation  while  the  development  of  our 

*  While  in  England  Mr.  Wells  saw  reason  to  abandon  this  view.  His 
last  report  as  Special  Commissioner  of  Revenue  was  made  in  December 
1869.  Our  internal  taxes  abstracted  from  the  people  that  year  $185,235,867. 
Did  he  recommend  their  exemption  from  this  grievous  burden,  or  any  consider 
able  portion  of  it  ?  Let  him  speak  for  himself.  While  admitting  that  the  sur 
plus  of  the  preceding  year  had  been  $124,000,000,  and  that  of  the  current  year 
would  be  much  larger,  he  said  : 

"Allowing,  then,  for  the  extreme  possible  loss  under  incomes,  the  amount  of 
taxation  above  proposed  to  be  remitted  to  the  people,  t»i  consideration  of  the 
present  large  and  increasing  surplus  of  receipts  over  expenditures,  would  be  in 
the  neighborhood  of  $26,000,000." 

He  would  retain  not  only  $150,000,000,  or  175,000,000  of  internal  taxes, 
but  proposed  in  connection  therewith  a  schedule  of  tariff  by  which  not  less 
than  $82,500,000  should  be  raised  from  tea,  coffee  and  other  imported  articles 
of  food  and  drink.  By  what  potent  logic  had  he  been  persuaded  to  abandon 
often-expressed  opinions,  and  assert  that  the  true  way  to  stimulate  development 
was  to  paralyze  industry  by  excessive  taxation  on  the  food  of  the  laborer  and 
the  productions  of  his  toil  ? 


106  HOW   OUR   WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE    PAID. 

boundless  productive  power  was  stimulated  by  the  exi 
gencies  of  the  war,  and  our  own  market  was  secured  to 
our  own  producers  by  the  difference  between  our  lawful 
currency  and  gold,  in  which  payment  of  duties  on  imports 
was  required.  The  taxes  under  which  those  hundreds  of 
millions  accumulated  were  assessed  while  war  was  raging 
and  for  war  purposes,  and  could  have  been  borne  as  long 
as  the  conditions  I  have  indicated  were  maintained.  Wise 
men  know  this,  and  that  the  war  terminated  abruptly  and 
earlier  than  was  expected,  and  do  not  hold  the  Secretary 
accountable  for  the  results  of  this  contingency.  No  mat 
ter  what  sacrifices  it  involved,  the  people  would  have 
cheerfully  borne  them  rather  than  yield  the  questions  put 
at  issue  by  the  war.  But  these  questions  have  been  hap 
pily  settled  by  war's  arbitrament.  Peace  is  restored,  our 
currency  approximates  the  specie  standard,  and  it  is  dis 
covered  that  by  aid  of  our  inordinate  internal  taxes  for 
eign  manufacturers  are  monopolizing  our  home  market. 
Our  publishers  buy  their  paper  and  print  and  bind  their 
books  in  England  or  Belgium  ;  our  umbrella-makers  have 
transferred  their  workshops  to  English  towns ;  our  woolen 
and  worsted  mills  are  closed  or  closing,  and  the  laborers 
in  these  branches  are  not  only  wasting  their  capital,  which 
consists  in  their  skill  and  industry,  but  drawing  from  the 
savings-banks  or  selling  the  Government  bonds  in  which 
they  had  invested  their  small  accumulations  to  maintain 
their  families  during  the  winter ;  and  our  enlarged  impor 
tations  of  foreign  goods  are  swelling  the  balance  of  trade 
against  us  and  preparing  us  for  general  bankruptcy.  The 
surprise  of  which  Mr.  McCulloch  speaks  is  excited  by  the 
fact  that  in  view  of  this  condition  of  things  the  Secretary 
of  the  Treasury  should  urge  the  maintenance  of  extra 
ordinary  taxes  sufficient  to  enable  him  to  apply  not  less 
than  $50,000,000  per  annum  to  the  extinguishment  of  our 
debt  by  the  rapid  absorption  of  the  only  portion  of  it 
which  bears  no  interest.*  Wonder  amounting  almost 
to  awe  does  possess  our  people,  but  it  is  excited  as 
was  that  of  the  unsophisticated  sailor  who,  in  the  midst 
of  an  exhibition  of  magical  illusions,  was  blown  into  the 
air  by  the  accidental  explosion  of  powder,  and  in  his 
damaged  condition  wondered  what  would  come  next  in 
the  order  of  exercises. 

*  Mr.  McCulloch's  proposition  was  to  maintain  all  existing  taxes  in  order  to 
contract  the  currency  by  cancelling  $50,000,000  of  greenbacks  annually. 


HOW   OUK  WAK   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID.  107 

That  the  tax-payers  Lave  resolved  that  the  principal  of 
our  debt  "shall  be  speedily  extinguished"  I  deny.  They 
regard  the  attempt  as  Quixotic,  as  destructive  of  our  in 
dustrial  interests,  and  beneficial  only  to  money-lenders, 
speculators  in  Government  securities,  and  foreign  manu 
facturers.  Sir,  if  the  Secretary  is  accessible  to  the  voice 
of  remonstrance  he  must  by  this  time  be  satisfied  that  there 
is  no  tax-payer  in  the  country  who  is  not  engaged  in  im 
porting  foreign  goods  or  shaving  notes,  or  who,  having 
bought  bonds  at  low  rates  in  a  depreciated  currency, 
hopes  to  have  them  redeemed  at  an  early  day  in  specie, 
who  does  not  dissent  from  the  assessment  of  extraordi 
nary  taxes  for  the  extinguishment  by  the  generation 
which  created  it,  of  a  debt,  the  security  of  which  is  un 
doubted  and  which  was  incurred  for  the  benefit  of  pos 
terity.  The  opinion  of  the  people  on  this  question  is 
modestly  expressed  by  the  editor  of  the  ablest  and  most 
instructive  of  our  industrial  journals,  the  Iron  Age. 
He  says : 

"We  are  glad  to  see  that  a  resolution  for  the  entire  removal  of 
the  manufacturers'  tax  of  five  per  cent,  has  been  introduced,  and 
hope  it  will  be  adopted.  As  an  independent  proposition,  outside  of 
any  other  amendment  of  the  tax  or  tariff  laws,  this  will  commend 
itself  to  the  good  sense  of  the  country  as  one  so  manifestly  just 
that  we  should  expect  there  would  be  a  very  general  expression  of 
public  feeling  in  its  favor.  All  classes  can  heartily  unite  in  this 
effort  to  untrammel  the  industry  of  the  country  and  to  cheapen 
production.  The  free-trader  and  protectionist  can  at  least  here 
agree ;  the  workman  is  quite  as  directly  interested  in  this  matter 
as  the  employer,  for  the  effect  of  the  tax  is  only  to  restrict  the 
demand  for  the  products  of  his  labor.  As  a  war  necessity  we 
cheerfully  accepted  this  burden  which  the  manufacturers  of  the 
country  have  borne  with  such  uncomplaining  loyalty  ;  but  now  that 
the  necessity  is  past,  and  that  the  national  exchequer  is  in  such  a 
condition  that  it  can  easily  and  safely  dispense  with  the  revenue  it 
produced,  we  think  we  are  entitled,  on  behalf  of  manufacturers  and 
their  workmen,  to  demand  its  repeal.  England,  with  all  her  load 
of  taxes,  has  no  such  impost  as  this  ;  her  uniform  policy  is  in 
every  way  possible  to  cheapen  the  production  of  her  wares,  and  in 
the  unequal  contest  which  we  are  called  to  wage  with  her  it  is  in 
the  last  degree  unwise  to  put  ourselves  under  this  additional  and 
unnecessary  disability." 

Sir,  this  generation  embraces  the  widows,  orphans,  and 
maimed  soldiers  of  the  contending  parties  in  a  civil  war, 
each  of  which  parties  had  armies  numbering  more  than  a 
million  men  in  the  field.  They  at  least  are  in  no  condi 
tion  to  welcome  excessive  taxation,  especially  those  of 


108  HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAN  BE   PAID. 

the  South,  who  are  without  even  the  poor  pittance  we 
give  ours  as  pensions.  The  folly  of  the  dull  farmer  I 
have  supposed — a  case  of  stupidity  scarcely  probable, 
though  possible  within  the  range  of  human  dullness — is 
the  wisdom  by  which  the  Secretar}'  proposes  to  guide  the 
finances  of  this  country  and  extricate  them  from  embar 
rassments  which  in  this  report  he  depicts  as  almost  over- 
vhelming.  Let  us  hear  him.  He  says  that — • 

1  "  He  has  been  clear  in  his  convictions  that  specie  payments  are 
not  to  be  restored  by  an  accumulation  of  coin  in  the  Treasury  to 
be  paid  out  at  a  future  day  in  the  redemption  of  Government  obli 
gations  ;  but  rather  by  quickened  industry,  increased  production, 
and  lower  prices,  which  can  alone  make  the  United  States  what 
they  ought  to  be — a  creditor  and  not  a  debtor  nation." 

And  as  if  to  illustrate  his  want  of  sincerity,  or  the  con 
fusion  of  his  ideas,  proceeds  to  speak  of  "certain  branches 
of  industry  that  are  now  languishing  under  the  burdens 
which  have  been  imposed  on  them ;"  and  to  tell  us  that 
though  "  the  people  of  the  United  States  are  naturally  a 
commercial  and  maritime  people,  fond  of  adventure — 
bold,  enterprising,  persistent" — 

"  The  disagreeable  fact  must  be  admitted,  that,  with  unequaled 
facilities  for  obtaining  the  materials,  and  with  acknowledged  skill  in 
ship- building,  with  thousands  of  miles  of  sea-coast,  indented  with 
the  finest  harbors  in  the  world,  with  surplus  products  that  require 
in  their  exportation  a  large  and  increasing  tonnage,  we  can  neither 
profitably  build  ships  nor  successfully  compete  with  English  ships 
in  the  transportation  of  our  own  productions.  Twenty  years  ago 
it  was  anticipated  that  ere  this  the  United  States  would  be  the  first 
maritime  Power  in  the  world.  Contrary  to  our  anticipations,  our 
foreign  commerce  has  declined  nearly  fifty  per  cent,  within  the  last 
six  years." 

And  as  if  to  impress  us  more  profoundly  with  our 
present  inability  to  bear  excessive  taxation,  he  sets  forth 
the  following  statistics : 

"The  tonnage  of  American  vessels  engaged  in  the  foreign  carry 
ing  trade  which  entered  United  States  ports  was — 

Tons. 

In  1860 5,921,285 

In  1865 2,943.661 

In  1866 3,372,060 

"The  tonnage  of  such  vessels  which  were  cleared  from  the 
United  States  was — 

Tons. 

In  1860 6,165,924 

In  1865 3,025,134 

In  1866 3,383,17  6 


HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID.  109 

"  The  tonnage  of  foreign  vessels  which  entered  onr  ports  was — . 

Tons. 

In  1860 2,353,911 

In  1865 3,216,967 

In  1866 4,410,424 

"  The  tonnage  of  foreign  vessels  which  were  cleared  was — 

Tons. 

In  1860 2,624,005 

In  1865 3,595,123 

In  1866 4,438,384" 

While  admitting  that  something  of  the  diminution  of 
our  shipping  must  be  attributed  to  the  effects  of  the  war, 
the  Secretary,  as  if  to  prove  that  high  taxes  have  been 
more  destructive  than  war,  says: 

"  The  scarcity  of  American  vessels  ought  to  have  produced,  and 
but  for  a  redundant  currency  and  high  taxes  would  have  produced, 
activity  in  our  ship-yards  and  a  rapid  increase  of  tonnage ;  but  this 
has  not  been  the  case.  The  prices  of  labor  and  materials  are  so 
high  that  ship-building  cannot  be  made  profitable  in  the  United 
States,  arid  many  of , our  ship-yards  are  being  practically  transferred 
to  the  British  Provinces.  It  is  only  a  few  years  since  American 
ships  were  sought  after  on  account  of  their  superiority  and  cheap 
ness  ;  and  large  numbers  of  vessels  were  built  in  Maine  and  other 
States  on  foreign  account  or  sold  to  foreigners,  while  at  the  same 
time  our  own  mercantile  marine  was  being  rapidly  increased. 
.  .  .  .  It  is  an  important  truth  that  vessels  can  be  built  very 
much  cheaper  in  the  British  Provinces  than  in  Maine.  Nay,  fur 
ther,  that  timber  can  be  taken  from  Virginia  to  the  Provinces,  and 
from  these  Provinces  to  England,  and  there  made  into  ships  which 
can  be  sold  at  a  profit ;  while  the  same  kind  of  vessels  can  only  be 
built  in  New  England  at  a  loss  by  the  most  skilful  and  economical 
builders 

"The  same  causes — a  redundant  currency  and  high  taxes — that 
prevent  ship-building  tend  to  prevent  the  building  of  houses  and 
even  of  manufactories.  So  high  are  prices  of  every  description  that 
men  hesitate  to  build  dwellings  as  fast  as  they  are  required,  and  thus 
rents  are  so  advanced  as  to  be  oppressive  to  lessees,  and  the  healthy 
growth  of  towns  and  cities  is  retarded.  So  it  is  in  regard  to  manu 
factories.  Mills  which  were  built  before  the  war  can  be  run  profita 
bly,  but  so  expensive  are  labor  and  materials  that  new  mills  cannot 
be  erected  and  put  into  operation  with  any  prospect  of  fair  returns 
upon  the  investment  unless  upon  the  expectation  that  taxes  will 
remain  as  they  are  and  prices  be  sustained,  if  they  are  not  advanced. 
The  same  causes  are  injuriously  affecting  agriculture  and  other  in 
terests  which  it  is  not  necessary  to  particularize.  It  is  everywhere 
observed  that  existing  high  prices  are  not  only  oppressing  the 
masses  of  the  people,  but  are  seriously  checking  the  development, 
growth,  and  prosperity  of  the  country." 

What  remedies  does  our  sagacious  Secretary  propose  for 
the  evils  he  so  truthfully  depicts?  One,  and  apparently 
in  his  judgment  the  most  efficacious,  is  that  which  I  have 


110  HOW   OUR   WAR    DEBT   CAN   BE    PAID. 

been  considering,  namely,  to  add  not  less  than  four  or 
five  million  dollars  per  month  to  the  price  of  American 
products  by  taxing  them  to  that  amount  for  the  express 
purpose  of  extinguishing  so  much  of  our  national  debt !  If 
gentlemen  doubt  my  statement  I  beg  them  to  give  the  re 
port  an  attentive  reading.  This  mad  policy  pervades  all 
its  suggestions.  Nor  is  it  to  be  temporary.  It  is  to  be 
the  fixed  policy  of  the  Government,  and  he  says  our  debt 
which,  according  to  his  statement,  was  on  the  31st  of 
October  last  $2,551,424,121.20,  "  can  be  paid  by  the  gene 
ration  that  created  it." 

Sir,  if  my  suspicion  that  the  preparation  of  the  Secre 
tary's  report  was  committed  to  a  treacherous  subordinate 
be  correct,  gentlemen  will  be  able  to  estimate  the  wanton 
ness  of  that  person's  cruelty  by  the  fact  that  in  further 
illustration  of  the  absurdity  of  its  leading  proposition  he 
proceeds  to  tell  us  that  "  between  the  years  1848  and  the 
1st  of  July,  1860,  the  product  of  the  gold  and  silver 
mines  of  the  United  States  was  about  $1*100,000,000,"  but 
that  "it  is  not  probable  that  the  amount  of  gold  and  silver 
now  in  the  United  States  is  very  much  larger  than  it  was 
eighteen  years  ago."  And  as  if  to  give  greater  effect  to 
what,  were  it  not  gravely  trifling  with  the  prosperity  of  the 
American  people,  might  be  regarded  as  a  huge  joke,  adds 
the  fact  that  beside  exporting  all  our  bullion  we  have,  in 
exchange  for  perishable  foreign  commodities  which  we 
might  have  fabricated  from  our  own  raw  materials,  given 
to  foreign  capitalists,  who  now  hold  them,  interest-bearing 
evidences  of  debt  to  the  amount  of  $600,000,000,  as  fol 
lows  : 

United  States  bonds $350,000,000 

State  and  municipal  bonds 150,000,000 

Railroad  and  other  stocks  arid  bonds..  100,000,000 


Total $600,000,000 

Nor  does  he  yet  stay  his  hand  in  presenting  reasons  why 
we  should  not  adopt  his  proposition,  for  he  informs  us 
that  the  reports  of  the  custom-houses  show  that  though 
we  exported  specie  during  the  fiscal  year  which  ended 
June  30th,  1866,  to  the  amount  of  $82,643,374,  the 
balance  of  trade,  as  shown  by  those  reports,  was  still 
against  us  in  gold  values  $8,009.577.  And  with  a  mea 
sure  of  candor  for  which  I  award  him  full  credit  adds : 


HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID.  Ill 

"  But  these  figures,  taken  from  the  reports  of  the  custom-housevS, 
do  not  present  the  whole  truth.  For  many  years  there  has  been  a 
systematic  undervaluation  of  foreign  merchandise  imported  into  the 
United  States,  and  large  amounts  have  been  smuggled  into  the 
country  along  our  extended  sea-coasts  and  frontiers.  To  make  up 
for  undervaluations  and  smuggling,  and  for  cost  of  transporta 
tion  paid  to  foreign  shipowners,  twenty  per  cent,  at  least  should  be 
added  to  the  imports,  which  would  make  the  balance  for  the  past 
year  against  the  United  States  nearly  $100,000,000.  It  is  evident 
that  the  balances  have  been  largely  against  the  United  States  for 
some  years  past,  whatever  may  have  been  the  custom-house  re 
turns." 

Mr.  Chairman,  I  confess  my  ignorance  of  "  Ingeany 
bankin',"  and  will  proclaim  my  gratitude  to  any  of  its  dis 
ciples  who  will  so  far  admit  me  to  its  mysteries  as  to  ena 
ble  me  to  reconcile  the  Secretary's  premises  and  conclu 
sions. 

Meanwhile  I  ask  who  but  he,  unless  it  be  bankers  and 
shavers  of  notes,  importers  of  foreign  goods,  and  holders 
of  our  bonds  who  desire  to  get  two  dollars  for  every  one 
they  invested  in  them,  who  but  these  does  not  see  in  this 
fearful  array  of  evidences  of  our  tendency  to  universal 
bankruptcy  a  necessity  for  developing  our  productive 
power  by  diminishing  the  internal  taxes  of  the  country  to 
the  lowest  possible  amount  consistent  with  an  economical 
administration  of  the  Government?  And  who  except  the 
classes  just  enumerated  does  not  see  that  by  continuing 
the  course  we  are  pursuing  we  are  retarding  the  perma 
nent  resumption  of  specie  payments  and  postponing  the 
day  when  we  shall  be  able  to  enter  judiciously  upon  the 
extinguishment  of  our  debt  ? 

Mr.  McCulloch  does  not  seem  to  perceive  that  this  fear 
ful  array  of  facts  is  but  so  many  concurrent  items  of  evi 
dence  that  notwithstanding  our  freedom,  enterprise,  and 
energy,  and  our  infinitely  diverse,  easily-accessible,  and 
inexhaustible  stores  of  natural  wealth,  our  extended  sea- 
coast,  fine  harbors,  broad  lakes,  and  far-rolling  rivers, 
which  invite  us  to  manufacturing  and  maritime  effort  and 
preeminence,  we  are  but  a  mere  commercial  dependency. 
Like  all  other  debtors  we  are  at  the  mercy  of  our  credi 
tors.  Though  richer  in  natural  resources  than  all  of  them 
combined,  the  continuance  of  our  prosperity  is  dependent 
upon  the  caprices  or  necessities  of  England  and  the  na 
tions  of  Europe,  which,  by  protecting  their  industry  and 
importing  only  raw  material  or  commodities  but  slightly 
wrought  and  exporting  products  as  much  manufactured 


112  HOW    OUR   WAR    DEBT   CAN    BE   PAID. 

as  possible,  practice  economies  unknown  to  us,  and  by 
diversifying  their  industry  provide  remunerative  employ 
ment  for  all  their  people. 

Manufactures  and  agriculture  are  each  the  handmaid  of 
the  other,  and  the  successful  practice  of  both  is  a  prere 
quisite  to  profitable  and  sustained  commerce.  That  sea 
board  nation  which  most  diversifies  its  productions  and 
best  protects  its  skilled  labor  against  unequal  competition 
will  ever  be  foremost  in  the  race  for  commerce. 

No,  sir;  the  Secretary  does  not  see  the  proper  applica 
tion  of  the  facts  he  cites,  and  while  dilating  upon  them 
illustrates  his  profound  ignorance  of  the  progress  social 
science  has  made  by  reiterating  trite  maxims  from  Eng 
lish  handbooks  of  political  economy  to  prove  that  inter 
national  trade-balances  are  settled  with  gold  and  silver 
and  that  the  flow  of  specie  "  indicates  the  condition  and 
results  of  trade  between  different  nations."  In  the  light 
of  these  laws  I  point  him  and  the  country  to  the  fact  that 
the  trade  between  us  and  foreign  nations  has  carried  them 
our  cotton  and  wool,  our  beef,  pork,  grain  and  other 
staples,  and  $1,100,000,000  of  our  bullion  with  $600,000,- 
000  of  our  bonds  to  pay  for  wines,  silks,  laces,  cloths,  etc., 
which  have  been  consumed,  and  iron  rails  to  stretch 
across  the  coal  and  iron  beds  which  underlie  our  country 
from  the  Atlantic  coast  to  the  Pacific  and  from  the  lakes 
to  the  Gulf,  and  ask  them  if  the  facts  do  not  indicate 
bankruptcy  as  the  "  result  "  if  the  present  and  past  "  con 
dition  "  of  that  trade  be  maintained  ?  And  whether, 
when  as  now  we  are  compelled  to  look  to  internal 
taxes  for  the  bulk  of  our  receipts,  when  duties  on  foreign 
imports  could  under  no  possible  system  provide  us  with 
adequate  income,  it  would  riot  be  well  as  a  pure  question 
of  revenue  to  so  adjust  our  taxes  as  to  relieve  American 
labor  and  land  from  every  possible  exaction,  and  by  every 
possible  device  stimulate  the  development  of  our  pro 
ductive  power  and  the  immigration  of  skilled  laborers  into 
the  country  ?  Thus,  and  thus  alone,  can  we  check  the 
flow  of  specie  and  bonds  to  Europe  and  retain  among  us 
as  capital  the  production  of  our  gold  and  silver  mines 
with  which  to  redeem  the  $600,000,000  of  bonds  now 
held  by  foreigners.  This  the  Secretary  professes  to  desire, 
but  how  the  imposition  of  extraordinary  taxes  upon  our 
industry  to  the  amount  of  $50,000,000  per  annum  is  to 
promote  it  he  has  not  condescended  to  inform  us. 


HOW    OUR   WAR   DEBT   CAX   BE    PAID.  113 

The  scheme  of  the  Secretary  is  as  unprecedented  as  it  is 
unwise.  It  is  without  a  single  historical  example.  The 
first  Federal  debt  was  funded  in  1791,  and  for  sixteen 
years  no  effort  was  made  to  reduce  it.  In  1807  the  re 
ceipts  of  the  Government  from  ordinary  sources  were  in 
excess  of  current  expenses,  and  the  surplus  was  applied  to 
the  debt.  This  easy  and  natural  process  of  extinguish 
ment  continued  until  1812.  The  average  rate  of  payment 
per  annum  from  1807  to  1812  was  about  $6,000,000,  arid 
at  the  breaking  out  of  the  war  with  Great  Britain  the 
debt  had  been  reduced  from  $75,000,000  to  $45,000,000. 
It  was  swollen  by  that  war  to  $127,000,000 ;  but  no  ex 
traordinary  taxes  were  imposed  for  its  redemption.  The 
revenues  of  the  Government  were  derived  from  ordinary 
sources,  and  such  balances  as  remained  after  paying  cur 
rent  expenses  were  applied  to  its  absorption.  No  states 
man  of  either  period  proposed  to  cripple  industry  and 
retard  the  development  of  the  country  by  the  imposition 
of  extraordinary  taxes  as  a  means  of  extinguishing  its 
debt. ^  They  wisely  stimulated  both  by  imposing  higher 
duties  upon  foreign  importations,  and  under  the  avowedly 
protective  tariffs  of  1824  and  1828  paid  it  off'.  Such  a 
spectacle  had  never  been  witnessed  before,  for  no  other 
nation  had  ever  liquidated  its  entire  debt. 

The  American  people  will  rather  follow  the  successful 
example  of  the  statesmen  of  those  days  and  foster  our 
industry,  than  accept  the  crotchets  of  our  present  Secre 
tary  of  the  Treasury  and  cripple  labor  and  diminish  pro 
duction  by  extraordinary  taxation.  They  freely  lent 
their  substance  to  the  Government  and  hold  more  than 
eighty  per  cent,  of  our  national  securities,  and  none  of 
them  are  demanding  payment.  Nor  need  we  be  specially 
anxious  about  that  part  of  our  bonds  that  are  held  in  Eu 
rope.  They  who  hold  them  bought  them  as  investments 
or  as  matter  of  speculation.  As  investments  they  pay 
better  interest  than  the  holders  can  elsewhere  obtain  with 
equal  security,  and  we  are  not  required  to  prostrate  our 
industry  by  a  vain  attempt  to  hasten  the  day  on  which 
foreign  speculators  shall  realize  anticipated  profits.  Eng 
land  has  never  been  guilty  of  such  stupidity.  When  the 
Napoleonic  wars  closed,  the  governing  class  of  England 
held  her  bonds,  and  like  the  money-changers  and 
"  Ingeany  "  bankers  of  our  -country  clamored-'  for  the  re 
sumption  of  specie  payments  that  they  might  get  par  for 
8 


114  HOW   OUR  WAR  DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID. 

the  bonds  which  they  had  bought  during  those  wars  at 
such  prices  as  our  own  sold  for  and  in  paper  as  irredeem 
able  and  depreciated  as  ours  has  been.  By  this  operation 
they  would  have  made  an  average  of  one  hundred  per 
cent,  on  their  investments.  But  governing  class  as  they 
were,  it  was  not  until  seven  years  after  the  close  of  the 
war  that  the  statesmen  who  controlled  the  financial  affairs 
of  Great  Britain  attempted  the  experiment  of  resumption, 
or  till  the  suspension  had  endured  for  well  nigh  a  quarter 
of  a  century.  And  only  within  a  few  years — I  think  I 
may  say  within  the  present  decade — has  England  made 
serious  effort  to  reduce  the  principal  of  her  debt,  nor  has 
she  yet  imposed  an  extraordinary  tax  for  the  purpose. 
Her  statesmen  knew  that  her  population  was  increasing  and 
her  productive  power  in  process  of  rapid  development, 
and  they  know  that  so  long  as  the  interest  is  ready  at 
maturity  and  the  creditors  of  the  nation  see  that  its  taxes 
are  diminishing  and  its  population  and  resources  increas 
ing,  they  will  regard  the  investment  as  safe. 

Thus  has  England,  while  permitting  her  debt  to  increase, 
by  showing  her  steady  ability  to  diminish  the  taxes  upon  her 
people  and  provide  for  interest  and  current  expenditures, 
been  able  to  reduce  the  interest  on  her  debt  from  war 
rates  to  the  low  rates  at  which  she  now  holds  it ;  and  that 
debt  which  by  its  immense  volume  seemed  to  overshadow 
her  whole  future,  is  now  not  in  the  proportion  of  ten  per 
cent,  per  man,  per  dollar,  and  per  acre  to  what  it  was  at  the 
date  of  the  treaty  of  Paris.  So  will  it  be  with  us  if  we 
shun  the  nostrums  of  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury.  The 
estimated  wealth  of  the  loyal  States  at  this  time  is  $17,- 
428,000,000,  and  their  annual  product  is  at  least  $4,685,- 
000,000.  But  thirty  years  hence,  if  the  progress  of  our 
growth  is  not  retarded  by  financial  charlatanism,  the 
wealth  of  those  States  will  be  $90,000,000,000,  and  the 
annual  product  not  less  than  $23,000,000,000,  and  the 
now  prostrate  but  naturally  richer  South  will  then  rival 
the  people  of  the  North  in  prosperity  and  tax-paying 
power. 

Let  me,  Mr.  Chairman,  as  it  is  due  to  the  Secretary  I 
should,  say,  that  he  does  not  rest  this  urgent  demand  for 
the  speedy  extinguishment  of  the  debt  upon  principles  of 
social  science  or  national  economy.  In  this  matter  his 
head  yields  to  his  heart.  He  is  guided  by  a  sentiment. 
He  prides  himself  upon  his  magnanimity,  and  would  ruin 


HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID.  115 

the  industry  of  the  North  and  retard  the  development  of 
our  country  for  a  century  if  need  be  rather  than  wound 
the  sensibilities  of  our  "  erring  southern  brethren."  Thus, 
after  indulging  in  some  trite  reflections  upon  the  evil  of 
public  debt  in  general,  he  tells  us  that — 

"To  the  perpetuation  of  the  existing  debt  of  the  United  States 
there  are  also,  it  may  be  proper  to  remark,  serious  objections  grow 
ing  out  of  the  circumstances  under  which  it  was  created.  Although 
incurred  in  a  great  struggle  for  the  preservation  of  the  Government, 
and  therefore  especially  sacred  in  its  character,  its  burdens  are  to 
be  shared  by  those  to  whom  it  is  a  reminder  of  humiliation  and 
defeat.  It  is  exceedingly  desirable  that  this,  with  other  causes  of 
heart-burnings  and  alienation,  should  be  removed  as  rapidly  as  pos 
sible,  and  that  all  should  disappear  with  the  present  generation,  so 
that  there  may  be  nothing  in  the  future  to  prevent  that  unity  and 
good  feeling  between  the  sections  which  are  necessary  for  true 
national  prosperity." 

To  others  than  the  Secretary  it  is  known  that  the  coun 
try  is  no  longer  divided  into  hostile  sections.  That  which 
made  the  South  sectional  was  slavery  and  pride  of  caste. 
Slavery,  thank  God,  has  been  forever  abolished,  and  pride 
of  caste  is  vanishing.  Yes,  sir,  the  decree,  sustained  by  a 
majority  of  nearly  half  a  million  of  the  voters  of  the 
northern  States  and  enduring  as  the  fiat  of  Heaven,  that 
pride  of  caste  must  disappear  from  American  politics  has 
gone  forth.  Henceforth  he  who  breathes  the  air  of  our 
country,  let  his  color  or  fatherland  be  what  or  where  it 
may,  may  by  his  own  volition  invest  himself  with  the 
attributes  of  American  citizenship.  Every  one  born  on 
the  soil  is  a  citizen,  and  our  naturalization  laws  are  hence 
forth  of  universal  application. 

I  fear  the  southern  people  after  reading  the  Secretary's 
report  will  regard  him  rather  as  a  man  of  sentiment  than 
of  affairs.  They  may  applaud  the  delicacy  of  his  sensibil 
ities,  but  while  doing  so  will  probably  wish  that  a  well- 
informed  statesman  presided  over  his  Department.  De 
structive  to  northern  interests  as  the  attempt  to  provide 
for  the  payment  of  our  debt  by  extraordinary  taxes  on 
this  generation  would  be,  the  southern  people  are  less  able 
than  we  to  endure  the  mad  experiment.  Among  them 
are,  as  I  have  said,  the  widows,  orphans,  and  maimed  sol 
diers  of  their  armies,  whose  poverty  is  not  relieved  even 
by  the  pittance  we  give  as  pensions  to  the  same  classes ; 
their  industrial  system  has  been  overthrown  and  is  not 
yet  reorganized ;  their  cities  and  towns  by  their  dilapida- 


116  HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT  CAN  BE   PAID. 

tion  tell  how  their  trade  and  commerce  have  suffered,  and 
their  lands  to  a  great  extent  lie  waste;  their  banks,  insur 
ance  companies,  and  other  moneyed  institutions  have  gone 
into  liquidation ;  their  railroads  are  in  ruins  and  almost 
bare  of  rolling-stock ;  and  they  are  making  daily  appeals 
to  the  people  of  the  North,  whose  presence  among  them 
the  baser  sort  of  Southerners  will  not  permit,  for  capital  with 
which  to  open  and  work  mines  of  gold,  silver,  copper,  lead, 
iron,  and  coal,  in  which  their  land  abounds.  Scourged  by 
the  results  of  their  own  folly  they  are  awakening  to  a 
knowledge  of  the  value  of  their  possessions,  and  are  propos 
ing  to  make  them  available.  They  desire  if  they  can 
obtain  the  requisite  capital  to  locate  the  factory  near  the 
cotton-field  and  the  forge  and  furnace  near  the  mine  and 
ore  bed. 

A  brief  extract  or  two  from  southern  papers  of  very 
recent  date  will  show  how  cruel  Mr.  McCulloch  is  to  those 
to  whom  he  wishes  to  be  so  kind.  Says  the  Petersburg, 
Ya.,  Index : 

"  The  variety  of  schemes  devised  for  the  relief  of  that  numerous 
and  unfortunate  class  of  persons  who  are  now  laboring  under  pecuni 
ary  embarrassment  evinces  the  necessity,  as  well  as  the  difficulty, 
of  providing  an  adequate  remedy  for  the  mischief  sought  to  be  pre 
vented.  A  further  extension  of  the  stay  law,  a  total  or  partial  re 
pudiation  of  private  indebtedness,  and  the  exemption  of  specified 
property  from  involuntary  alienation  are  some  of  the  expedients  now 
brought  forward  to  meet  the  pressing  exigencies  of  the  occasion." 

The  Nationalist,  Mobile,  Alabama,  says: 

"  Reliable  planters  from  Mississippi  say  that  not  one  half  dozen, 
on  an  average,  in  each  county  in  that  State,  can  pay  their  debts, 
Large  tracts  of  valuable  land  are  selling  at  nominal  rates. 

And  the  Eichmond,  Ya.,  Times  says 

"If  the  tide  of  immigration  continues  to  flow  by  us,  and  we  make 
no  energetic  and  intelligent  effort  to  secure  it,  taxation  will  speedily 
devour  what  little  the  war  left,  and  a  few  years  hence  when  the  pine, 
the  persimmon,  and  the  sassafras  have  made  a  wilderness  of  many  a 
broad  and  once  fertile  field,  some  inauspicious  day  the  tax-gatherer 
or  the  sheriff  will  hang  out  his  red  flag  over  the  ruins  of  the  old 
family  mansion,  and  then,  alas  for  the  paternal  acres,  and  the  dear, 
sacred  old  homes  of  our  boyhood  !  for  everything,  even  the  dear  old 
graveyard,  where  repose  the  honored  dust  of  our  forefathers  and  the 
bones  of  many  a  noble  'soldier  son'  and  fair  daughter,  will  pass  into 
the  hands  of  some  codfish-eating  Puritan  from  Boston  or  Nan- 
tucket." 


HOW   OUR   WAR    DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID.  117 

How  incapable  the  people  of  North  Carolina  are  of  en 
during  extraordinary  taxation  is  shown  by  reference  to 
facts  which  occurred  anterior  to  the  war  by  a  writer  in  the 
Newbern  Times  of  September  8.  After  saying  with  truth 
that  "  the  old  North  State  is  inferior  to  none  of  her  sisters 
in  the  combined  advantages  of  situation,  climate,  agricul 
tural  and  mineral  riches,"  he  proceeds  to  make  the  follow 
ing  exhibit : 

"In  1860  North  Carolina  ranked  as  twelfth  among  the  States, 
containing  a  population  of  992,622,  of  whom  331 ,059  were  slaves. 
The  free  population  are  distributed  according  to  places  of  birth,  as 
follows : 

Born  in  North  Carolina. 634,220 

Born  in  other  southern  States 21 ,446 

Born  in  northern  States 2.399 

Born  in  foreign  countries 3,299 

Born  at  sea  and  not  classified 201 

"  While  North  Carolina  was  thus  receiving  from  without  her  limits 
about  twenty-seven  thousand  immigrants,  she  sent  as  emigrants  to 
other  States  no  less  than  272,606  of  her  free-born  offspring  who  are 
scattered  throughout  the  western  and  southwestern  States,  of  whom 
Tennessee  received  55,000,  Georgia  29,000,  Indiana  27,000,  Alabama 
23,000,  Arkansas  18,000. 

"  She  was  ninth  among  the  States  in  her  contribution  to  the 
population  of  the  Union;  seventh  in  contributing  to  the  popula 
tion  of  other  States ;  behind  all,  save  little  Delaware  and  South 
Carolina,  which  ranks  last  of  all,  in  the  reception  of  citizens  from 
other  States. 

"Of  the  vast  foreign  immigration,  numbering  upward  of  four  mil 
lions,  which  has  built  up  the  manufactures  and  the  internal  improve 
ments  of  the  northern  and  western  States,  she  received  only  about 
three  thousand,  standing  in  that  respect  behind  every  State  in  the 
Union  and  behind  three  of  the  Territories." 

But  how  capable  the  future  people  of  North  Carolina 
will  be  is  well  shown  by  the  editor  of  the  Old  North  State, 
published  at  Salisbury.  In  an  article  entitled  "  The 
Future  of  North  Carolina,"  he  says : 

"  The  questions  present  themselves,  how  is  all  this  to  be  done,  and 
can  the  Government  promote  the  great  object  by  a  proper  policy  ? 
We  shall  endeavor  to  answer  these  questions  to  the  best  of  our  poor 
ability. 

"  The  abolition  of  slavery  has,  in  our  opinion,  changed  the  destiny 
of  the  State.  The  negro  cannot  be  entirely  relied  upon  as  a  laborer, 
and  he  must  be  assisted  by,  or  his  place  be  supplied  with  white  labor 
ers  sooner  or  later.  These,  except  in  a  small  portion  of  the  State, 
cannot  be  profitably  employed  in  agricultural  pursuits  until  other 
interests  are  brought  prominently  forward  arid  partially  developed. 
This  cannot  be  done  without  an  influx  of  capital  from  abroad. 

44  The  greatest  of  these  interests,  and  those  which  we  shall  notice 


118  HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE    PAID. 

on  this  occasion,  are  the  raining  and  manufacturing  interests.  It  is 
perfectly  useless  for  us  to  speak  of  the  vast  mineral  wealth  of  North 
Carolina ;  it  is  known  to  all  the  world  to  be  inferior  to  that  of  no 
country  on  the  globe,  both  in  quantity,  quality,  and  variety  of  min 
erals,  but  we  may  have  no  capital  to  render  them  available. 

"  And  to  the  capitalist  who  desires  to  engage  in  manufacturing, 
no  country  in  the  world  presents  more  inducements  than  North 
Carolina.  Her  water-power  is  unsurpassed.  As  a  general  thing 
steam  is  useless  in  the  State  for  manufacturing  purposes ;  for  the 
face  of  the  country  is  intersected  by  water  courses  such  as  abound 
in  few  other  lands.  If  we  look  at  the  map  we  shall  see  that  there  is 
a  perfect  net-work  of  streams,  showing  that  it  is  one  of  the  best 
watered  portions  of  the  earth,  and  the  structure  of  the  country  is 
such  that  every  one  of  these  streams  can  be  made  to  drive  machin 
ery.  All  this  magnificent  provision  of  nature  has  thus  far  been  per 
mitted  to  waste,  in  a  great  measure  at  least. 

"  It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  refer  to  these  facilities  more  in  detail. 
Every  reader  knows  the  vast  capacity  of  our  larger  rivers  for  these 
purposes.  That  of  the  Roanoke,  the  Neuse,  the  Haw,  the  Deep,  the 
Main  Yadkin,  the  South  Yadkiii,  the  Little  Yadkin,  the  Catawba, 
and  other  rivers  of  the  State  for  driving  machinery,  is  scarcely 
equaled  by  any  in  the  world,  while  we  have  many  other  smaller 
streams  of  very  great  capacity. 

"And  when  all  this  water  power  is  turned  to  account  for  manufac 
turing  purposes,  as  it  will  be  at  no  great  distance  of  time,  when  we 
have  thousands  of  furnaces  in  full  blast  turning  the  ores  from  the 
bowels  of  the  earth  into  the  richest  marketable  commodities,  and 
when  our  vast  deposits  of  coal  shall  be  used  for  these  and  other 
purposes  for  which  nature  intended  them,  what  a  country  we  will 
have  !  What  vast  amounts  of  wealth  must  then  flow  into  our  laps. 
Our  State  will  then  be  dotted  over  with  the  most  flourishing  manu 
facturing  towns  and  villages  and  our  now  barren  fields  will  teem 
with  the  richest  verdure. 

"  This  must  necessarily  be  so.  We  stated  at  the  outset  that  until 
the  mining  and  manufacturing  interests  were  at  least  partially  de 
veloped  imported  white  labor  could  not  be  profitably  employed  in 
agricultural  pursuits.  But  when  these  interests  become  to  be  a 
power  in  the  State  the  thing  changes.  All  the  thousands,  if  not  the 
hundreds  of  thousands,  of  factory  operatives  and  miners  must  find 
a  support,  and  the  result  will  be  that  vast  home  markets  will  be 
created.  The  soil  will  be  heavily  taxed  for  their  sustenance  and 
consequently  vast  improvements  will  be  made  in  our  system  of  agri 
culture — and  nothing  needs  improvement  more.*  But  we  will  not. 
pursue  this  line  of  remark  further — we  have  presented  the  general 
outlines  and  we  leave  it  to  the  imagination  of  our  readers  to  fill  up 
the  picture.  In  the  course  of  time  the  farms  of  our  State  will  rival 
those  of  the  Dutch  Pennsylvanians ;  our  lands  will  become  equally 
productive,  while  our  system  of  internal  improvements  will  become 
equal  to  theirs." 

More  gladly,  sir,  than  the  people  of  the  North  will 

*  Dreading  such  an  influx  of  immigrants,  the  democratic  members  of  Cong-ess 
from  North  Carolina  voted  with  the  free  trade  representatives  of  New  York  city 
against  protective  duties. 


HOW   OUR   WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID.  119 

v.iose  of  the  South  welcome  release  from  every  dol 
lar  of  taxation  from  which  sagacity  can  exempt  them. 
And  I  assure  the  Secretary  that  the  people  of  no  part  of 
the  country  have  shared  so  largely  as  those  of  the  South 
the  surprise  and  wonder  to  which  he  alludes. 
Mr.  McCulloch  truly  says : 

"  We  have  but  touched  the  surface  of  our  resources ;  the  great 
mines  of  our  national  wealth  are  yet  to  be  developed." 

This  is  specially  true  as  to  the  southern  portion  of  our 
country,  and  in  the  name  of  the  impoverished  people  of 
that  section  I  ask,  is  it  well  to  tax  a  generation  the  sur 
face  of  whose  resources  has  not  been  touched  by  the 
transmuting  hand  of  labor,  and  the  mines  of  whose  wealth 
are  yet  to  be  developed,  in  order  to  pay  the  principal  of 
a  mortgage  the  holder  of  which  neither  needs  nor  desires 
his  money  ?  and  would  not  wisdom  or  state  craft  suggest 
the  propriety  of  enabling  the  owners  of  these  mines  of 
wealth  to  accumulate  capital  with  which  to  work  them 
and  by  the  magic  touch  of  labor  to  convert  them  into  cur 
rent  gold  ?  The  taxing  process  must  continue  our  ex 
hausting  dependence  on  foreign  nations,  while  the  de 
veloping  process  would  make  us  as  free  commercially 
as  we  are  politically,  and  enable  us,  by  our  example  of 
liberal  wages  and  freedom  from  their  exhausting  hours  of 
toil,  to  influence  the  commercial  and  manufacturing  usages 
of  European  States,  as  our  political  example  is  influencing 
their  political  and  social  institutions. 

The  Secretary,  however,  has  other  prescriptions  than 
that  of  excessive  taxation  by  which  to  restore  the  country. 
In  his  opening  paragraphs  he  says : 

"  With  proper  economy  in  all  the  Departments  of  the  Govern 
ment,  the  debt  can  be  paid  by  the  generation  that  created  it,  if  wise 
and  equal  revenue  laws  shall  be  enacted  and  continued  by  Congress, 
and  these  laws  are  faithfully  enforced  by  the  officers  charged  with 
their  execution."  ^  ,. 

Again,  he  tells  us  that  he  "  has  mainly  directed  his  at 
tention  to  measures  looking  to  an  increase  of  efficiency  in 

*  Mr.  McCulloch's  Fort  Wayne  speech,  in  which  he  promised  to  bring  about  a 
resumption  of  specie  payments  in  two  years  by  contracting  the  currency,  cost 
the  American  people  hundreds  of  millions.  The  mere  announcement  paralysed 
enterprise.  No  new  projects  were  undertaken  till  Congress  prohibited  further 
contraction,  and  many  that  were  in  process  of  construction  were  suspended  or 
abandoned.  Practical  men  everywhere  saw  that  the  result  of  his  policy  would 
be  bankruptcy  and  not  resumption. 


120  HOW   OUR   WAR    DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID. 

the  collection  of  revenues,  to  the  conversion  of  interest- 
bearing  notes  into  five-twenty  bonds,  and  to  a  reduction 
of  the  public  debt."  Efficiency  in  the  collection  of  reve 
nues,  forsooth  !  "  The  faithful  enforcement  of  laws  by 
the  officers  charged  with  their  execution ! "  These  are 
brave  words  to  fall  from  the  lips  of  one  whose  faithless 
exercise  of  official  functions  in  this  very  matter  has  dur 
ing  the  past  year  cost  the  Government  more  than  $50,- 
000,000.  Brave  words,  indeed,  are  these  from  one  who  in 
a  wicked  attempt  to  subvert  the  popular  will  by  the  cor 
rupt  use  of  official  patronage  has  removed  hundreds  of 
well-tried,  capable  and  experienced  officers  of  the  revenue 
and  customs  departments  and  substituted  for  them  men 
deficient  alike  in  capacity,  experience,  and  character. 
There  is  not  a  congressional  district  in  the  country  whose 
people  are  not  grieving  over  the  fact  that  the  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury,  who  embodies  these  fine  phrases  in  his  re 
port,  has  wantonly  and  wickedly  aggravated  the  onerous 
taxation  under  which  they  groan.  Let  who  else  will 
speak  of  the  necessity  of  a  faithful  administration  and  due 
enforcement  of  the  revenue  laws,  for  which  every  patriot 
will  pray,  becoming  modesty  would  constrain  the  Secre 
tary  of  the  Treasury  to  avoid  the  topic.  This  is  a  matter 
on  which  Congress  should  take  early  action,  and  if  it 
means  that  the  customs  and  internal  revenue  laws  shall  be 
faithfully  and  impartially  enforced  it  must  see  that  another 
than  the  author  of  the  report  I  am  considering  shall  have 
the  selection  of  officers  for  their  enforcement. 

Some  of  the  Secretary's  suggestions  are  embodied  in 
distinct — no,  not  in  distinct,  but  in  numerical  propositions. 
To  one  of  these  I  invite  the  attention  of  the  committee. 
It  is  as  follows : 

"  2.  That  the  duties  upon  imported  commodities  should  corres 
pond  and  harmonize  with  the  taxes  upon  home  productions,  and  that 
these  duties  should  not  be  so  high  as  to  be  prohibitory,  nor  to  build 
up  home  monopolies,  nor  to  prevent  that  free  exchange  of  commodi 
ties  which  is  the  life  of  commerce.  Nor,  on  the  other  hand,  should 
they  be  so  low  as  to  seriously  impair  the  revenues,  nor  to  subject 
the  home  manufacturers,  burdened  with  heavy  internal  taxes,  to  a 
competition  with  cheaper  labor  and  larger  capital  which  they  may 
be  unable  to  sustain." 

"  There's  wisdom  for  you  !  "  I  venture  to  assert  that 
Jack  Bunsby  never  uttered  a  more  characteristic  propo 
sition  than  that ;  and  all  will  agree  that  since  the  cele- 


HOW   OUR   WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID.  121 

brated  Kane  letter  of  James  K.  Polk  our  political  litera 
ture  has  embodied  no  utterance  more  shrewdly  Delphic. 

This  ingeniously  inexpressive  proposition  is  not  the 
Secretary's  only  allusion  to  "  home  monopolies."  He 
seems  to  hold  them  in  special  dread  ;  and  it  is  to  be  deeply 
regretted  that  he  has  not  indicated  the  arguments  by  which 
his  apprehensions  are  sustained,  as  they  are  not  to  be 
found  in  the  works  of  the  disciples  of  any  school  of  politi 
cal  economy  or  social  science. 

The  teachers  of  free  trade  do  not  agree  with  him  in  be 
lieving  that  high  duties  "  build  up  home  monopolies." 
They  assert  that  protection  secures  undue  profits  to  cer 
tain  branches  of  production  and  tempts  capitalists  to  ruin 
themselves  by  so  overdoing  the  business  as  to  glut  the 
market  and  compel  them  to  sell  their  goods  at  small  pro 
fits  or  at  a  loss.  Their  theory  proceeds  upon  the  want  of 
judgment  in  capitalists  and  business  men — but  by  assert 
ing  that  high  duties  beget  undue  domestic  competition 
denies  that  they  promote  local  monopolies. 

Nor  does  Mr.  McCulloch  agree  with  the  school  of  pro 
tectionists,  for  they  say  that  assured  protection  against 
unequal  competition  gives  capitalists  confidence  and  in 
duces  them  to  open  mines  and  build  furnaces,  forges,  and 
factories,  whereby  constant  employment  and  ample  wages 
are  secured  to  the  otherwise  idle  people  of  the  country. 
This  theory  proceeds  on  the  assumption  that  the  American 
manufacturer  is  competent  to  measure  the  contingencies 
of  our  own  markets  and  of  the  course  of  foreign  trade, 
but  is  not  competent  to  resist  the  gigantic  efforts  which 
were  commended  by  Lord  Brougham,  and  one  of  which  is 
now  making  by  the  Crcesus-like  capitalists  of  England  "  to 
stifle  in  the  cradle  those  rising  manufactures  in  the  United 
States  which  the  war  has  forced  into  existence." 

Our  present  condition  resembles  very  closely  that  of  the 
States  of  Europe  at  the  close  of  Napoleon's  wars,  and  the 
following  passage  from  the  admirable  address  of  John  L. 
Hayes,  Esq.,  entitled,  "  The  Fleece  and  the  Loom,"  em 
bodies  illustrations  of  fixed  laws  applicable  enough  to  our 
condition  to  dispel  even  the  Secretary's  dread  of  "  home 
monopolies :" 

"  What  would  have  been  the  future  industrial  condition  of  conti 
nental  Europe  if  at  the  time  when  peace  restored  the  nations  to 
labor  the  textile  manufactures  had  been  left  to  their  own  free  coursa 
and  no  legislation  had  intervened  to  regulate  their  progress?  Can 


122  HOW    OUR   WAR   DEBT    CAN   BE   PAID. 

there  be  any  doubt  that  they  would  have  become  the  exclusive  oc 
cupation  of  England?  Alone  in  the  possession  of  steam  power  and 
machinery ;  alone  provided  with  ships  and  means  of  transport ; 
alone  endowed,  through  her  stable  legislation,  with  capital  to  vivify 
her  natural  wealth,  she  had  absolute  command  of  the  markets  of 
the  Continent.  The  question  was  presented  to  the  continental  na 
tions  whether  they  should  accept  the  cheap  tissues  of  England,  or 
at  some  sacrifices  repel  them,  to  appropriate  to  themselves  the  labor 
and  profit  of  their  production.  The  latter  course  was  successively 
adopted,  with  some  modifications,  by  each  of  the  continental  na 
tions ;  and  with  what  results  to  their  own  wealth  and  the  industrial 
progress  and  comfort  of  the  world?  Instead  of  a  single  workshop 
Europe  has  the  workshops  of  France,  Russia,  Austria,  Prussia,  Bel 
gium.  Sweden,  Denmark,  Spain,  each  clothing  its  own  people  with 
substantial  fabrics  ;  each  developing  its  own  creative  genius  and 
peculiar  resources  ;  each  contributing  to  substitute  the  excellence 
of  competition  for  the  mediocrity  of  monopoly ;  each  adding  to  the 
progress  of  the  arts  arid  the  wealth  and  comfort  of  mankind."  * 

The  fifth  of  the  Secretary's  propositions  is  "  the  rehabi 
litation  of  the  States  recently  in  insurrection."  Refer 
ring  to  the  conquered  territories,  which  notwithstanding 
the  President's  usurpations  await  the  action  of  the  law- 
making  power  for  reconstruction,  Mr.  McCulloch  says : 

"  Embracing  as  they  do  one-third  part  of  the  richest  lands  of  the 
country,  and  producing  articles  of  great  value  for  home  use  and  for 
exportation  to  other  countries,  their  position  with  regard  to  the  Gen 
eral  Government  cannot  remain  unsettled,  and  their  industrial  pur 
suits  cannot  continue  to  be  seriously  disturbed,  without  causing 
such  a  diminution  of  the  production  of  their  great  staples  as  must 
necessarily  affect  our  revenues,  and  render  still  more  unsatisfactory 

than  they  now  are  our  trade  relations  with  Europe 

There  will  be  no  real  prosperity  in  these  States,  and  consequently  no 
real  prosperity  in  one-third  part  of  the  United  States,  until  all  pos 
sess  again  equal  privileges  under  the  Constitution." 

If  it  be  true,  as  it  undoubtedly  is,  that  "  one-third  part 
of  the  richest  lands  of  the  country  "  are  by  reason  of  tem 
porary  causes  not  producing  "  articles  of  great  value  for 
home  use  and  for  exportation  to  other  countries,"  would 
it  not  seem  to  suggest  the  idea  that  this  unhappy  state  of 
affairs  should  be  permitted  to  pass  away  and  these  lands 
be  made  productive  before  they  should  be  burdened  with 
taxes  not  demanded  by  imperious  necessity  ?  And  the 
question  whether  before  these  lands  shall  be  able  to  bear 
taxation  for  that  purpose  the  people  of  the  North,  whose 


*  Why  may  not  the  Carolinas  compete  with  New  England  in  cotton  goods, 
and  Alabama  and  Missouri  with  Pennsylvania  in  iron  and  steel? 


HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAN  BE   PAID.  123 

sacrifices  during  the  war  saved  the  integrity  of  the  Union, 
should  be  called  upon  to  extinguish  the  debt  created  by 
the  crimes  of  the  possessors  of  this  broad  and  rich  ter 
ritory  ?  The  people  of  the  northern  States  have  certainly 
arrived  at  this  conclusion,  and  I  have  shown  that  school 
ed  by  suffering  the  people  of  the  South,  while  antagoniz 
ing  them  on  many  points,  agree  with  them  in  this. 

Pursuing  this  branch  of  his  subject,  Mr.  McCulloch 
asks,  "  Can  the  nation  be  regarded  as  in  a  healthy  condi 
tion  when  the  industry  of  so  large  a  portion  of  it  is  de 
ranged?"  And  the  people,  North  and  South,  answer 
"  No ;  and  in  our  enfeebled  condition  we  pray  you  not  to 
rob  us  of  our  working  capital  in  order  to  extinguish  a 
debt  which  was  contracted  for  the  benefit  of  mankind  and 
future  ages." 

He  asks  again,  "And  can  the  labor  question  at  the 
South  be  settled  as  long  as  the  political  status  of  the 
South  is  unsettled?"  And  the  country  answers,  "Yes, 
there  is  no  inseparable  connection  between  the  labor 
question  and  the  political  status  of  the  conquered  terri 
tories;"  and  adds  that  the  "  political  status"  of  the  South 
cannot  be  settled  until  its  rebellious  leaders  discover  that 
the  loyal  people  of  the  country  are  able  to  defend  its  in 
stitutions  against  the  usurpations  of  Andrew  Johnson,  and 
accepting  the  constitutional  amendments  already  adopted 
and  which  are  in  process  of  adoption  by  three-fourths  of 
the  States  which  now  constitute  the  Union,  submit  to 
Congress  constitutions  republican  in  form  upon  which  the 
people  shall  have  set  the  seal  of  their  approval.  The 
people  of  the  loyal  North  cannot  restore  those  of  the  con 
quered  territories  to  their  "  political  status."  We  can 
only  consent  to  their  restoration  when  they  shall  be  wil 
ling  that  it  shall  take  place  on  terms  which  will  render 
the  future  peace  of  the  country  secure,  and  for  this  we 
are  and  have  been  ready.  The  leaders  of  the  South,  not 
we,  are  the  dog  in  the  manger.  It  is  they  who,  by  refus 
ing  to  abandon  the  dogmas  that  evoked  the  war  and  the 
oligarchic  institutions  that  sustained  it,  resist  the  influx 
of  the  tide  of  immigration  that  would  fertilize  their  lands 
and  republicanize  their  institutions. 

The  imminent  want  of  the  people  of  the  South  is  not 
"  political  status."  That  would  not  enable  them  to  settle 
the  "  labor  question."  What  they  want  is  capital  and 
currency  and  a  willingness  to  permit  loyal  men,  whether 


124:  HOW    OUR   WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID. 

white  or  black,  native  or  foreign,  to  dwell  among  them, 
and  by  their  labor  quicken  into  commercial  value  the 
boundless  and  varied  natural  wealth  of  the  land  they 
occupy,  but  which  they  will  neither  work  themselves  nor 
permit  others  to  work  in  peace  and  safety.  When  in 
obedience  to  a  healthy  national  sentiment  or  the  prompt 
ings  of  their  own  interests  they  shall  make  capital  secure, 
^opinion  free,  and  give  peaceful  scope  to  enterprise  within 
their  borders,  the  immense  deposits  which  profitless  to 
their  owners  now  lie  in  bank,  because  under  the  hammer 
ing  process  of  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  judicious 
men  are  afraid  to  embark  in  new  enterprises,  will  be  trans 
ferred  to  the  South  to  develop  her  productive  and  taxable 
power,  and  make  her  populous  and  prosperous  beyond  the 
wildest  dream  of  the  visionary  theorists  who  involved  her 
in  a  war  as  causeless  as  it  was  disastrous. 

Mr.  Chairman,  time  will  not  permit  me  to  answer  all 
the  Secretary's  interrogatories  or  examine  each  of  his 
propositions. 

But  his  friends  may  complain  that  I  have  not  alluded 
to  that  which  they  regard  as  his  chief  specific.  It  is  set 
forth  in  the  second  of  another  series  of  propositions  as 
follows:  "a  curtailment  of  the  currency  to  the  amount 
required  by  legitimate  and  healthful  trade."  On  this 
point,  though  not  condescending  to  indicate  what  amount 
of  currency  is  in  his  judgment  required  by  "  legitimate 
and  healthful  trade  "  in  the  present  abnormal  condition 
of  the  country,  the  Secretary  is  peculiarly  coherent  and 
luminous.  He  is  clearly  a  disciple  of  Dr.  Sangrado. 
He  recognizes  the  circulating  medium  as  the  life-blood 
of  commerce,  and  as  Sangrado  attempted  to  restore  his 
patients  by  withdrawing  blood  and  injecting  warm  water 
into  their  veins,  he  proposes  to  assist  extraordinary  taxa 
tion  in  the  work  of  rehabilitating  the  southern  States, 
whose  great  want  is  currency  and  working  capital,  and  in 
invigorating  the  languishing  interests  of  the  North  by 
contracting  the  currency,  and  especially  by  withdrawing 
that  portion  which  is  of  equal  and  unquestioned  value  in 
every  part  of  the  country — the  United  States  notes,  com 
monly  called  "greenbacks."  He  says: 

"  He  regards  a  redundant  legal-tender  currency  as  the  prime  cause 
of  our  financial  difficulties  and  a  curtailment  thereof  indispensable 
to  an  increase  of  labor  and  a  reduction  of  prices  to  an  augmentation 
of  exports  and  a  diminution  of  imports,  which  alone  will  place  thu 


HOW    OUR   WAR   DEBT   CAX   BE    PAID.  125 

trade  between  the  United  States  and  other  nations  on  an  equal  and 
satisfactory  footing." 

And  that — • 

"  He  is  of  opinion  that  the  national  banks  should  be  sustained, 
and  that  the  paper  circulation  of  the  country  should  be  reduced, 
not  by  compelling  them  to  retire  their  notes,  but  by  the  withdrawal 
of  the  United  States  notes." 

Mr.  Chairman,  had  I  been  properly  instructed  in  the 
mysteries  of  "  Ingeany  bankin'  "  I  might  be  able  to  com 
prehend  and  appreciate  these  suggestions;  but  in  the 
blindness  of  my  ignorance  I  cannot  see  what  there  is  to 
commend  his  theory  to  the  Finance  Minister  of  our  coun 
try.  The  greenbacks  are,  it  is  true,  part  of  our  debt,  and 
must  therefore  at  some  day  be  redeemed  ;  but  they  are 
the  only  part  of  our  immense  debt  which  bears  no  interest ; 
and  while  there  are  outstanding,  as  the  Secretary's  state 
ment  of  December  1st,  1866,  shows,  $147,387,14:0  of  corn- 
pound-interest  notes  which  are  currency  and  used  as  such 
by  the  national  banks,  and  $699,933,750  of  three-years' 
notes  bearing  seven  and  three-tenths  per  cent,  interest,  all 
of  which  were  purchased  in  a  greatly  depreciated  currency, 
I  cannot  comprehend  the  philosophy  which  proposes  to 
let  the  interest  on  these  run,  while  absorbing  a  non-inter 
est-bearing  loan  which  the  people  cherish  as  furnishing 
the  best  currency  for  our  immense  domestic  commerce 
they  have  ever  had. 

The  experiment  if  attempted  as  a  means  of  hastening 
specie  payments  will  prove  a  failure,  but  not  a  harmless 
one.  It  will  be  fatal  to  the  prospects  of  a  majority  of  the 
business  men  of  this  generation  and  strip  the  frugal  labor 
ing  people  of  the  country  of  the  small  but  hard-earned 
sums  they  have  deposited  in  savings  banks  or  invested  in 
Government  securities.  It  will  make  money  scarce  and 
employment  uncertain.  Its  object  is  to  reduce  the  amount 
of  that  which  in  every  part  of  our  country  and  for  the 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  millions  of  dollars  of  domestic 
trade  is  money,  and  to  increase  its  purchasing  power;  and 
by  thus  unsettling  values  to  paralyze  trade,  suspend  pro 
duction,  and  deprive  industry  of  employment.  It  will 
make  the  money  of  the  rich  man  more  valuable  and  de 
prive  the  poor  man  of  his  entire  capital,  the  value  of  his 
labor,  by  depriving  him  of  employment.  Its  first  effect 
will  be  to  increase  the  rate  of  interest  and  diminish  the 


126  HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID. 

rate  of  wages,  and  its  final  effect  wide-spread  bankruptcy 
and  a  more  protracted  suspension  of  specie  payments. 
Anxious  as  the  people  are  to  relieve  the  country  of  the 
evils  entailed  upon  it  by  the  war,  and  willing  as  they 
have  proven  themselves  to  endure  any  privations  or 
sacrifices  required  by  the  exigencies  of  the  country,  they 
will  not  consent  to  an  experiment  involving  such  ter 
rible  consequences  for  the  purpose  of  paying  the  "  Inge- 
any  "  and  other  banks  which  hold  and  use  as  part  of  their 
reserve  our  compound-interest  notes,  two  dollars  for  every 
one  they  invested  in  this  interest-bearing  portion  of  our 
"  lawful  money."  Much  as  banks,  bankers,  and  specula 
tors  in  Government  securities  may  approve  this  policy,  the 
people  earnestly  and  indignantly  protest  against  it. 

Does  Mr.  McCulloch  forget  that  the  compound-interest- 
bearing  notes   are  part  of  the   "  legal  tender  currency  " 
against  which  he  declaims,  and  that  by  absorbing  them  he 
will  be  contracting  the  currency  and  reducing  the  volume 
of  interest  that  is  compounding  against  the  Government 
The  banks  are  required,  those  of  certain  cities,  to  mail 
tain  a  reserve   of  "  lawful  money  "  equal  to  twenty-fiv 
per    cent,    of    their    circulation    and    deposits,    and    a 
others  a  like  reserve  of  fifteen  per  cent.,  and  as  he  wej 
knows  they  have  absorbed  and  hold  not  greenbacks,  bu 
compound  interest  notes  as  that  reserve.     He  should  kee] 
his  non-interest-bearing  notes  afloat  till  these  are  redeemed 
They  will  mature  in  1867  and  1868,  and  by  redeeming  then 
he  will  contract  the  currency  at  the  rate  of  $6,000,00( 
per  month  and  relieve  the  Government  of  one  of  its  mos 
exhausting  interest  accounts.   By  this  process  he  will  keej. 
five-twenties  above    par,    promote    the    conversion   ink 
them  of  seven-thirties,  and  reduce  the  interest  on  that  por 
tion  of  our  debt  from  seven  and  three-tenths  to  six  pei 
cent.     But  by  his  process  of  contracting  the  volume  of 
greenbacks  and  imposing  extraordinary  taxes  on  our  in 
dustry  he  will  delay  the  redemption  of  the  one  and  the 
conversion  of  the  other,  and  may  deprive  us  of  the  ability 
to  redeem  either  the  seven-thirties  or  compound-interest 
notes  at  maturity. 

The  people  do  not  regard  greenbacks  and  the  notes  of 
national  banks  with  equal  favor,  but  have  a  well-grounded 
preference  for  the  former.  They  know  that  the  ultimate 
redemption  of  the  bank  notes  is  secured  by  deposits  of 
Government  securities  and  the  maintenance  of  a  reserve 


HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAK  BE   PAID,  127 

of  greenbacks ;  and  as  the  substance  is  more  solid  than 
its  shadow,  they  prefer  that  which  secures  to  that  which 
requires  to  be  secured.  Several  national  banks  have 
failed  ;  and  though  the  ultimate  redemption  of  the  notes 
was  secured,  there  was  no  provision  for  their  immediate 
redemption,  and  the  laboring  people  who  held  them  had 
to  sell  them  at  great  loss  to  "  Ingeany  "  or  other  bankers, 
who  could  afford  to  hold  them  till  the  Government  was 
ready  to  redeem  them.  Having  sustained  no  such  losses 
by  greenbacks  they  naturally  prefer  them.  Adequate  as 
these  reasons  are  for  the  popular  preference,  there  are 
others  which  I  will  state,  in  the  language  of  the  Secre 
tary's  report. 

Mr.  Hooper,  of  Massachussetts.  If  I  understand  the 
gentleman  from  Pennsylvania,  he  asserts  that  when  na 
tional  banks  fail  their  notes  cease  to  circulate.  Has  the  gen 
tleman  ever  heard  of  any  such  an  instance  ?  The  Govern 
ment  is  still  responsible  when  the  bank  fails,  and  these 
notes  are  redeemed  when  presented  at  the  Treasury.  I 
understand  they  circulate,  therefore,  as  well  after  as  before 
the  suspension  of  the  bank.  It  may  be  remembered  that 
the  Treasurer  of  the  United  States  was  recently  some 
what  criticised  by  the  press  for  his  statement  that  the 
national  bank  notes  were  better  after  the  bank  failed  than 
before. 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  have  recognized  the  ultimate  responsi 
bility  of  the  Government  for  them,  but  I  know  that 
traders  in  money  take  advantage  of  all  contingencies,  and 
I  have  known  laboring  men  to  sell  to  brokers  the  notes 
of  a  broken  national  bank  at  considerable  loss.  The  an 
nouncement  that  a  bank  has  failed  depreciates  the  notes 
in  the  market,  for  the  people,  especially  laboring  people, 
who  are  not  as  familiar  as  the  gentleman  from  Massa 
chusetts  with  all  the  minute  provisions  of  the  law  by 
which  the  ultimate  redemption  of  these  notes  is  secured  ; 
and  when  a  bank  fails  those  poor  people,  who  cannot  carry 
them  to  the  Treasury  for  redemption,  are  compelled  to 
sell  them  at  a  heavy  loss.  But,  as  I  was  proceeding  to 
show,  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  more  than  sustains 
my  position  on  this  point,  for  he  deliberately  argues  that 
legislation  is  required  "  to  make  them  throughout  the 
United  States  a  par  circulation.'-  He  says  : 

"  The  solvency  of  the  notes  of  national  banks  is  secured  by  a  de- 
.posit  of  bonds  with  the  Treasurer  at  Washington;  but  as  the  banks 


J.28  HOW   OUR  WAR    DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID. 

are  scattered  throughout  the  country,  and  many  of  them  are  in 
places  difficult  of  access,  a  redemption  of  their  notes  at  their  respec 
tive  counters  is  not  all  that  is  required  to  make  them  throughout 
the  United  States  a  par  circulation.  It  is  true  that  the  notes  of  all 
national  banks  are  receivable  for  all  public  dues,  except  duties  upon 
import?,  and  must  be  paid  by  the  Treasurer  in  case  the  banks  which 
issued  are  unable  to  redeem  them  ;  but  it  will  not  be  claimed  that 
the  notes  of  banks,  although  perfectly  solvent,  but  situated  in  inter 
ior  towns,  are  practically  as  valuable  as  the  notes  of  banks  in  th<5 
sea-board  cities." 

These  depreciatory  remarks  are  not  applicable  to  green 
backs.  They  are  of  equal  value  throughout  the  country, 
and  the  people  cherish  them  for  this  reason  more  than  from 
the  fact  that  they  are  the  evidence  of  a  patriotic  loan  made 
by  the  people  to  the  Government  without  interest.  Had 
Mr.  McCulloch  suggested  that  the  national  bank  notes,  for 
holding  bonds  to  secure  which  we  pay  the  banks  $18,000,- 
000  per  annum,  should  be  supplanted  by  greenbacks,  and 
that  a  sum  equal  to  the  interest  on  the  bonds  should  be 
applied  to  the  creation  of  a  sinking  fund  for  the  redemp 
tion  of  the  national  debt,  the  people  would  have  applauded 
his  wisdom  and  patriotism,  and  not  questioned  his  motives 
as  they  are  now  constrained  to. 

Had  such  been  the  Secretary's  suggestion  he  might  have 
omitted  this  one  of  his  propositions,  namely,  to  compel 
"  the  national  banks  to  redeem  their  notes  at  the  Atlantic 
cities,  or,  what  would  be  better,  at  a  single  city,"  which, 
in  plain  language,  is  a  recommendation  that  we  increase 
the  power  and  profits  of  the  banks  of  New  York  by  com 
pelling  every  national  bank  outside  of  that  city  to  deposit 
a  portion  of  its  funds  with  them.  The  gambling  tenden 
cies  of  the  New  York  speculators  in  stocks  and  provisions 
need  no  such  stimulant  as  this ;  and  recent  experience  has 
shown  that  leading  banks  of  that  city  are  managed  more 
recklessly  than  any  others  in  the  country,  and  would 
therefore  be  an  unsafe  depository  for  so  large  a  trust. 
Less  than  a  month  ago  the  Secretary  tested  their  manage 
ment  by  calling  upon  them  for  a  small  portion  of  the 
Government  deposits,  which  were  mistakenly  supposed  to 
be  represented  by  a  reserve  of  greenbacks  in  their  vaults, 
and  produced  a  perturbation  in  prices  throughout  the 
country  by  which  fortunes  were  lost  and  won.  He  has 
not  given  the  facts  to  the  country,  but  it  is  known  in  well- 
informed  circles  that  some  of  them  were  compelled  to  ask 
for  a  l<  brief  extension  "  because  they  were  unable  to  pay 


HOW    OUR   WAR   DEBT    CAN    BE    PAID.  129 

the  Government  drafts.  Practical  men  may  therefore  be 
excused  for  speaking  of  the  proposal  of  such  remedies  as 
charlatanism. 

Mr.  Chairman,  as  I  have  said,  the  Secretary  has  not 
ventured  to  indicate  what  in  his  judgment,  in  the  present 
condition  of  the  country,  is  the  amount  of  currency  "  re 
quired  by  legitimate  and  healthful  trade."  That  condition 
is  abnormal,  though  not  entirely  peculiar,  and  certainly 
not  unprecedented.  By  unwise  and  unpatriotic  legislation, 
which  was  dictated  by  the  magnates  of  the  South,  millions 
of  our  poor  people  were  doomed  to  the  simplest  and  least 
remunerative  forms  of  agricultural  labor,  or  to  enforced 
idleness,  in  which  they  were  tending  to  barbarism,  while 
our  raw  materials  were  being  wrought  into  fabrics  for  our 
use  in  the  workshops  of  transatlantic  nations,  and  we  had 
thus  been  drained  of  specie  and  had  become  largely  a 
debtor  nation  before  the  war  began.  Those  same  mag 
nates  plunged  us  into  a  war  of  unprecedented  proportions, 
which  we  were  unable  to  maintain  with  a  specie  or  con 
vertible  currency.  In  the  hour  of  our  need  we  discerned 
the  fact  that  ours  is  one  of  the  two  countries  to  which,  in 
the  language  of  Gortschakoff,  the  enlightened  prince  who 
is  guiding  the  destinies  of  the  other,  "God  has  given  such 
conditions  of  existence  that  their  grand  internal  life  is 
enough  for  them,"  and  determined  that  until  the  war  and 
its  consequences  should  have  passed  away  we  would  give 
the  world  an  example  of  our  ability  and  self-reliance,  and 
use  a  currency  based,  not  on  the  international  standard, 
gold  and  silver,  but  on  our  faith  in  the  resources  of  our 
country  and  the  integrity  of  its  Government.  We  thus 
furnished  the  Government  $3,000,000,000  with  which  to 
create,  arm,  feed,  clothe,  and  pay  our  Army  and  Navy. 

How  this  prompt  supply  of  money  quickened  industry 
and  developed  the  productive  power  of  the  country  1 
need  not  pause  to  say.  I  will,  however,  remind  the  com 
mittee  that  though  it  was  "irredeemable  legal-tender 
currency,"  it  restored  the  credit  of  the  nation,  which  had 
been  unable  to  borrow  $5,000,000  at  twelve  per  cent., 
and  lifted  the  people  from  the  bankruptcy  of  1857  to  a 
degree  of  prosperity  unequaled  in  our  history.  From 
1857  to  1861  the  rate  of  interest  was  high  and  that  of 
wages  low,  and  neither  capital  nor  labor  could  find  pro 
fitable  and  permanent  employment.  But  with  a  safe, 
though  perhaps  somewhat  reclupdant,  currency,  by  the 
9 


130  HOW   OUK  WAR   DEBT   CAN  BE   PAID. 

use  of  which  our  people  were  compelled  to  look  to  our 
own  workshops  for  supplies,  prosperity,  in  the  midst  of 
war,  succeeded  the  adversity  of  contracted  and  stagnant 
peace  with  magic  speed.  And  if  we  now  adopt  a  tariff 
that  will  protect  our  industry  as  faithfully  as  did  the 
difference  between  our  paper  and  gold,  in  which  we  re 
quired  the  duties  on  foreign  imports  to  be  paid  during  the 
war,  we  will  soon  discover  that  there  is  ample  and  profit 
able  employment  for  all  the  currency  authorized  by  law ; 
and  that  if  we  resolutely  refuse  to  increase  its  volume  it 
will  approximate  the  standard  of  convertibility  more 
rapidly  by  the  development  of  the  productive  power  of 
the  country  and  the  diversification  of  employment  for 
the  people  than  it  can  by  the  process  of  contraction  at 
any  rate.  Protection  and  development  will  insure  a  pros 
perous  future ;  but  rapid  contraction  will  reproduce  the 
stagnation,  bankruptcy,  and  suffering  of  1837  and  1857. 

The  question  presented  to  the  mind  of  practical  states 
men  is  not  what  would  be  the  best  currency  if  we  were 
founding  a  new  community,  or  how  far  we  might  with 
advantage  add  paper  to  a  purely  metallic  currency,  but  is, 
what  under  existing  conditions  do  the  true  interests  of  the 
country  require.  And  on  this  question  I  again  take  issue 
with  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  and  deny  that  the 
country  will  find  in  a  rapid  or  material  contraction  of  its 
currency,  or  in  extraordinary  taxation,  a  remedy  for  any 
of  the  evils  that  afflict  it.  If,  as  some  of  his  friends  have 
done,  .the  Secretary  should  point  me  to  the  high  prices 
which  many  articles  command,  or  to  the  immense  deposits 
which,  unproductive  to  their  owners,  are  enhancing  the 
present  profits  and  future  liabilities  of  the  banks,  I  will 
reply  to  him,  as  I  have  to  them,  that  these  are  not  proofs 
of  the  redundancy  of  the  currency,  but  of  his  mistaken 
policy  and  inveterate  mismanagement. 

Though  the  use  of  these  immense  deposits  is  lost  to  their 
cautious  proprietors,  the  money  does  not  lie  idle  in  the 
vaults  of  banks ;  it  is  lent  on  call  in  large  sums  to  adven 
turers,  who  by  its  use  enhance  the  price  of  such  commodi 
ties  as  they  can  monopolize  or  control.  Those  who  could 
make  their  own  capital  productive  are  afraid  to  use  it, 
and  reckless  gamblers  riot  in  its  use.  Yes,  sir,  the  Secre 
tary's  policy  is  calculated  to  diminish  production  and 
stimulate  speculation,  which  symptoms  have  been  the 
twin  precursors  of  all  our  commercial  crises  and  eras  of 
bankruptcy.  Under  his  fatal  policy — 


HOW    OUR   WAR    DEBT   CAN    BE    PAID.  131 

"The  native  hue  of  resolution 
Is  sicklied  o'er  with  the  pale  cast  of  thought ; 
And  enterprises  of  great  pith  and  moment, 
With  this  regard,  their  currents  turn  awry, 
Arid  lose  the  name  of  action." 

The  sagacious  but  prudent  owners  of  these  deposits 
grieve  that  the  money  with  which  they  would  gladly  open 
coal  mines  and  ore  banks,  and  build  forges  and  furnaces 
and  factories,  and  import  skilled  laborers  from  Europe  to 
increase  and  diversify  our  productions,  enlarge  our  home 
market,  and  swell  the  revenues  of  the  Government,  lies 
dead  and  profitless  to  them.  They  justly  charge  their  loss 
and  that  of  the  country  to  Mr.  McCulloch,  who,  from  his 
Fort  Wayne  speech  forward,  has  lost  no  opportunity, 
official  or  unofficial,  to  warn  the  energetic  men  of  the 
country  against  embarking  in  any  new  enterprises  or 
accumulating  any  considerable  stock  of  goods,  or  other 
wise  enlarging  their  arrangements  for  the  future ;  and 
who,  in  his  last  utterance — the  report  which  I  am  consider 
ing — notifies  them  of  the  near  approach  of  the  fatal  collapse 
by  assuring  them  that  though  the  banks  are  without 
specie,  the  balance  of  trade  vastly  against  us,  and  the 
Treasury  has  nearly  one  billion  dollars  of  temporary  loan 
to  provide  for,  he  is  "  confident  that  specie  payments  may 
be  resumed  by  the  time  our  interest-bearing  notes  are 
retired,  which  must  be  done  in  less  than  two  years,  and 
probably  will  be  in  a  much  shorter  period." 

What  the  effect  of  an  effort  at  early  resumption  under 
such  circumstances  would  be  every  experienced  business 
man  in  the  country  knows.  They  know  that  it  can  by 
any  possibility  be  but  a  spasmodic  movement,  which  will 
literally  vomit  forth  from  the  country  the  little  gold  and 
silver  left  in  it.  They  know  that  it  will  bankrupt  individ 
uals,  corporations,  States,  and,  alas,  it  may  be,  the  national 
Government  itself.  The  avowed  object  of  the  Secretary 
in  contracting  the  currency  is  to  increase  the  purchasing 
power  of  money;  and  they  know  that  the  rapid  decline  in 
prices  pending  this  mad  experiment  will  sweep  away  the 
garnered  capital  of  those  manufacturers  whose  stock,  ex 
clusive  of  buildings  and  machinery,  largely  exceeds  their 
working  capital,  that  mechanical  and  manufacturing  pro 
duction  must  be  wholly  suspended  till  the  blighting  tor 
nado  shall  have  spent  its  power,  and  that  while  it  rages 


132  HOW   OUR   WAR    DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID. 

the  receipts  of  the  Internal  Revenue  Bureau  must  fall  to 
Kero.* 

But,  sir,  if  by  thus  returning  to  the  wretchedness  of 
1857  and  1837  we  could  resume  specie  payments,  how 
Jong  could  we  maintain  them?  The  Secretary  tells  us 
that  $350,000,000  of  our  bonds  are  held  abroad.  The 
average  rate  at  which  they  were  bought,  when  gold  for 
long  periods  was  above  two  hundred  per  cent.,  was  less 
than  fifty  cents  on  the  dollar,  nor  was  that  small  amount 
paid  in  specie ;  for  he  also  tells  us  that — • 

"  The  opinion  that  the  country  has  been  benefited  by  the  exporta 
tion  of  its  securities  is  founded  upon  the  supposition  that  we  have 
received  real  capital  in  exchange  for  them.  This  supposition  is  to 
a  large  extent  unfounded.  Our  bonds  have  gone  abroad  to  pay  for 
goods  which  without  them  might  not  have  been  purchased.  Not 
only  have  we  exported  the  surplus  products  of  our  mines  and  our 
fields,  with  no  small  amount  of  our  manufactures,  but  a  large 
amount  of  securities  also,  to  pay  for  the  articles  which  we  have 
purchased  from  other  countries.  That  these  purchases  have  been 
stimulated  and  increased  by  the  facility  of  paying  for  them  in  bonds 
can  hardly  be  doubted.  Our  importations  of  goods  have  been  in 
creased  by  nearly  the  amount  of  the  bonds  which  have  been  ex 
ported.  Not  one  dollar  in  five  of  the  amount  of  the  five-twenties 
now  held  in  England  and  upon  the  Continent  has  been  returned  to 
the  United  States  in  the  form  of  real  capital.  But  if  this  were  not  a 
true  statement  of  the  case,  the  fact  exists,  as  has  been  already  stated, 
that  some  three  hundred  and  fifty  millions  of  Government  bonds — 
not  to  mention  State  and  railroad  bonds  and  other  securities — are  in 
the  hands  of  the  citizens  of  other  countries,  which  may  be  returned  at 
any  time  for  sale  in  the  United  States,  and  which  being  so  held 
may  seriously  embarrass  our  efforts  to  return  to  specie  payments." 

*  The  following  figures,  from  the  financial  column  of  the  papers  of  July  3d, 
furnish  pregnant  proof  of  the  criminal  charlatanism  of  those  who  advocate  a 
resumption  of  specie  payments,  while  the  interest  account  and  balance  of  trade 
are  sufficiently  against  us  to  justify  these  figures. 

"  The  exports  from  New  York  of  gold  and  silver  coin  and  bullion  for  the  fiscal 
year  1870-71  are  as  follows: 


July $16,922,451 

August 10,587,040 

September  4,618,850 

October 2,416,356 

November 4,896,257 

December 1,950,879 


January $2,149,211 

February 4,022,066 

March 7,569,880 

April 9,593,029 

May 9,615,698 

June *9,265,460 


Total,  fiscal  year  1871 $93,566,219 

Foreign  specie  imported 9,591,731 


Net  outgo  from  New  York $83,974,488 

The  clearances  of  gold  and  silver  on  Saturday,  July  1,  not  included  in  above, 
but  coming  into  the  new  fiscal  year,  were  $3,125,797."-- -The  Press,  July  4,  1871. 

*  Unofficial. 


HOW    OUR    WAR   DEBT    CAN    BE    PAID.  133 

Thus  by  Mr.  McCulloch's  own  statement  it  appears  that 
our  bonds  were  bought  at  half  their  nominal  value  and 
paid  for  in  commercial  products  which  should  have  been 
created  by  our  own  industry  from  our  own  raw  material 
by  setting  "  our  unemployed  and  poor  people  at  work  on 
the  growth  of  our  own  lands  ;"  and  if  we  may  believe  the 
Secretary's  statement  to  which  I  have  referred,  a  large 
portion  of  these  commodities  were  brought  into  the  coun 
try  in  fraud  of  our  revenue  laws  by  "  undervaluations  and 
smuggling."  For  what  purpose,  let  me  ask,  were  those 
bonds  bought  by  their  foreign  holders?  How  long  will 
they  be  held  ?  When  and  under  what  contingencies  are 
they  likely  to  be  returned  to  this  country?  And  in  this 
connection  a  more  pregnant  question  still:  what  effect 
would  be  produced  by  the  early  return  to  specie  payments 
threatened  by  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  ? 

That  I  may  do  Mr.  McCulloch  no  injustice,  I  answer 
these  momentous  questions  in  the  language  of  his  report : 

"A  large  portion  of  these  bonds  have  been  bought  on  speculation, 
and  will  be  likely  to  be  returned  whenever  financial  troubles  in  the 
countries  in  which  they  are  held  shall  make  it  necessary  for  the 
holders  to  realize  upon  them,  or  whenever  satisfactory  profits  can 
be  made  by  returning  them,  which  will  be  when  they  nearly  ap 
proach  their  par  value  in  coin." 

Here  at  least  he  is  right.  Those  bonds,  having  been 
bought  at  half  the  value  expressed  on  their  face,  will  be 
returned  "  when  they  nearly  approach  their  par  value  in 
coin,"  and  that  will  be  when  we  resume  specie  payments. 
But  as  Mr.  McCulloch  has  failed  to  pursue  this  operation 
to  its  inevitable  result,  the  committee  will  pardon  me  for 
attempting  the  duty,  though  in  doing  so  I  may  deepen  the 
shades  in  the  melancholy  picture  of  our  future  which  I 
have  presented. 

When  the  foreigners  who  bought  our  bonds  on  specu 
lation  perceive  that  by  returning  them  they  can  convert 
them  into  gold  and  double  their  investment,  they  will 
assuredly  avail  themselves  of  the  literally  golden  oppor 
tunity.  Questions  as  to  how  they  can  reinvest  the  proceeds 
advantageously  ne'ed  not  deter  them.  They  know  how 
limited  our  stock  of  specie  is,  how  heavy  is  the  balance 
of  trade  against  us,  and  consequently  that  by  selling  their 
bonds  in  our  markets  they  would  compel  us  to  suspend 
specie  payments  again.  Nor  are  they  strangers  to  the  fact 


134  HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAX   BE    PAID. 

that  during  that  suspension  they  would  be  able  to  repur 
chase  their  bonds  for  half  the  gold  received  for  them. 
Thus  the  experiment  of  the  Secretary  would  inevitably 
terminate  in  the  impoverishment  of  the  people  and  the 
disgrace  of  the  country  by  a  renewed  and  more  protracted 
suspension  of  specie  payments. 

Mr.  Chairman,  neither  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury 
nor  Congress  know  whether  our  currency  is  in  excess  of 
the  amount  required  by  legitimate  and  healthful  trade,  or 
if  it  be;  how  long  it  will  remain  so  if  undisturbed  by  legis 
lation.  Nor  can  we  settle  these  points  by  an  appeal  to 
experience,  for  many  of  our  conditions  are  novel.  That 
would  be  a  curious  and  instructive  calculation  which  would 
show  the  country  the  precise  demand  for  currency  created 
by  the  operation  of  the  Bureau  of  Internal  Ke venue,  or  by 
the  enlargement  of  the  Army  and  Navy  and  clerical  force 
of  the  Government. 

Under  the  discipline  of  Providence  the  southern  people 
will,  before  many  years  glide  away,  consent  to  permit  their 
fields  to  be  tilled,  their  mines  to  be  worked,  and  their 
cities  to  be  rebuilt  and  expanded ;  and  who  can  tell  the 
amount  of  currency  that  will  then  be  required  by  the  four 
million  enfranchised  slaves  and  the  millions  of  poor  whites, 
who  did  not  in  the  past,  but  are  henceforth  to  earn  wages  and 
buy  and  sell  commodities,  or  for  handling  the  crops  and 
mineral  productions  of  the  South?  Since  we  last  ad 
journed  the  iron  horse  has  crossed  Nebraska  on  one  of  the 
routes  to  the  Pacific,  and  his  snort  has  been  heard  in  the 
neighborhood  of  Fort  Kiley  on  another ;  and  during  the 
last  year  three  hundred  thousand  industrious  people,  who 
had  been  fed  and  clothed  through  unproductive  childhood 
at  the  cost  of  other  nations,  came  and  cast  their  lot  among 
us  to  till  our  fields,  smelt  our  ores,  work  our  metals,  and 
manage  our  spindles  and  looms ;  and  I  cannot  guess  what 
amount  of  currency  these  energetic  people  and  the  west 
ward-marching  column  of  our  civilization  will  require. 
But,  sir,  of  one  thing  I  am  certain,  and  it  is  that  had  the 
Secretary  of  the  Treasury  not  destroyed  all  sense  of  secur 
ity  in  the  future,  the  demand  for  currency  to  purchase, 
especially  in  the  South,  mineral  and  other  lands  and  de 
velop  their  productive  power  would  have  prevented  the 
accumulation  of  the  immense  deposits  which  now  lie  para 
lyzed  in  bank  or  are  loaned  on  call  to  speculators  in  the 
necessaries  of  life.  We  unsettled  values  and  made  or  scat- 


HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAX   BE    PAID.  135 

tered  fortunes  by  the  rapid  expansion  of  the  currency ; 
and  the  people  implore  us  to  avoid  another  violent  change 
fraught  with  like  consequences,  and  to  stay  the  work  of 
contraction  till  we  shall  have  ascertained,  at  least  proxi- 
mately,  the  amount  of  currency  required  by  healthy  and 
legitimate  trade. 

Mr.  Chairman,  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  is  not  a 
philosopher — 

"  A  primrose  by  a  river's  brim 
A  yellow  primrose  is  to  him ; " 

And  the  thing  that  has  been  is,  in  his  belief,  the  thing 
that  shall  be  forever.  Neither  his  experience  as  an 
"Ingeany"  banker  nor  his  official  connection  with  the 
Government  has  disclosed  to  him  the  real  relation  of  cur 
rency  in  detail  or  in  volume  to  the  business  of  a  commun 
ity.  Throughout  his  report  he  assumes  that  the  currency 
is  redundant,  and  ascribes  to  its  alleged  redundancy 
consequences  which  are  directly  attributable  to  another 
cause,  but  remotely  connected  with  the  question  of  the 
amount  of  currency.  I  refer  to  the  prevailing  and  tradi 
tional  vice  in  our  banking  system,  that  of  building  credits 
upon  credit,  of  banking  on  deposits,  or  of  lending  money 
by  a  bank  to  one  man  because  it  owes  a  like  amount  to 
another  who  has  intrusted  his  funds  to  it  for  safe-keeping 
and  convenience.  To  this  vice  in  our  banking  system, 
which  Mr.  McCulloch  has  done  much  to  aggravate  by  leav 
ing  stupendous  balances  of  the  public  funds  in  favored 
banks,  is  to  be  ascribed  nearly  all  the  evils  he  mistakenly 
attributes  to  a  "redundant  legal-tender  currency."  If  the 
corporations  and  private  bankers  of  the  country  were 
prohibited  from  lending  on  call  the  deposits  intrusted  to 
them  or  from  using  them  in  discounting  paper,  doubling 
the  volume  of  currency  would  not  produce  a  material 
advance  in  the  price  of  commodities  in  general.  This  vice 
in  our  banking  system,  this  banking  on  deposits  or  lending 
that  which  the  banks  owe,  and  to  calls  for  the  payment 
of  which  they  are  constantly  liable,  aggravates  from  four 
hundred  to  one  thousand  fold  every  modification  of  oui 
currency,  whether  it  be  by  contraction  or  expansion. 

Neither  the  price  of  gold  nor  of  other  commodities  is 
regulated  nor  materially  influenced  by  the  amount  of  cur 
rency  ;  nor  is  the  difference  between  gold  and  our  currency 
evidence  that  the  latter  is  inflated.  If  the  Secretary  con- 


136  HOW    OUE    WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE    PAID. 

troverts  these  propositions,  I  will  remind  him  that  gold 
commanded  a  premium  of  185  in  1864,  and  ask  him  to  let 
us  know  how  much  he  had  contracted  the  currency  before 
it  went  down  to  25,  as  it  did  in  June,  1865  ;  and  again, 
how  much  he  expanded  the  currency  to  put  the  premium 
>n  gold  up  again  to  50,  at  about  which  figure  it  stood  so 
ong  before  dropping  to  29  and  ascending  again  to  its 
present  price.  During  all  these  fluctuations  the  volume 
of  currency  was  not  essentially  modified.  What  a  com 
mentary  these  facts  are  upon  the  theories  of  the  Secretary 
and  his  costly  but  vaunted  attempts  "  to  keep  the  business 
of  the  country  as  steady  as  possible."  On  this  point  he 
says : 

"  He  has  regarded  a  steady  market  as  of  more  importance  to  the 
people  of  the  country  than  the  saving  of  a  few  million  dollars  in  the 
way  of  interest." 

And  elsewhere,  that — 

"  The  Secretary  has  also  deemed  it  to  be  his  duty  to  use  such 
means  within  his  control  as  were,  in  his  judgment,  best  calculated 
to  keep  the  business  of  the  country  as  steady  as  possible,  while  con 
ducted  on  the  uncertain  basis  of  an  irredeemable  currency.  To  ac 
complish  this  he  has  thought  it  necessary  to  hold  a  handsome  reserve 
of  coin  in  the  Treasury." 

But,  sir,  assuming  that  the  volume  of  currency  does  not 
regulate  prices,  and  that  apart  from  the  often  fatal  vice  in 
our  banking  system  to  which  I  have  alluded  it  has  but 
little  influence  on  them,  I  appeal  from  the  judgment  of 
Mr.  McCulloch  to  that  of  the  people,  and  ask  whether,  if  the 
volume  of  currency  regulated  prices,  it  would  not  affect 
every  species  of  property  equally  or  nearly  so? 

If  prices  are  regulated  by  the  volume  of  currency,  how 
is  it  that  American  wool  is  as  cheap  in  the  Philadelphia 
market  now  as  it  was  before  the  war  ?  How  is  it  that  corn 
is  unusually  low  and  wheat  is  commanding  a  higher  price 
than  ever  before  in  the  history  of  our  country?  How  is  it 
that  during  the  last  month  one  variety  of  cotton  goods, 
those  known  as  brown  or  unbleached  goods,  advanced 
twenty  per  cent.,  or  two  cents  per  yard,  and  another 
variety,  bleached  goods,  declined  twenty  per  cent.,  or  from 
five  to  seven  cents  per  yard  ?  How  is  it  that  mess  pork 
commands  but  about  half  last  year's  prices,  while  the  de 
cline  in  beef  has  been  little  more  than  nominal?  And 
how  is  it  that  in  1865,  with  gold  at  25,  Lehigh  coal  com- 


HOW   OUR   WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID.  137 

manded  at  the  shipping  point  from  five  to  six  dollars  per 
ton,  and  in  1866,  with  gold  ranging  from  32  to  40,  the  same 
qualities  of  coal  at  the  same  points  will  not  bring  three 
dollars  to  three  dollars  and  a  quarter  per  ton? 

But  I  will  not  weary  the  committee  with  further  illus 
trations  of  the  absurdity  of  the  Secretary's  postulate.  It  is, 
however,  proper  that  before  leaving  this  point  for  the 
present  I  should  admit  that  a  violent  and  sudden  contrac 
tion  of  the  currency  at  a  time  when  the  loans  of  our  banks 
are  extended  by  lending  their  deposits  does  work  an 
inevitable  and  often  ruinous  reduction  of  prices.  It  is 
thus:  under  the  influence  of  contraction  depositors  draw 
upon  their  reserve,  and  the  banks  to  meet  the  demand  call 
upon  their  debtors,  and  they  to  protect  their  credit  must 
sell,  no  matter  at  what  sacrifice,  at  such  prices  as  they  can 
get.  I  need  not  follow  the  movement  to  its  consequences. 
A  tight  money  market,  by  causing  a  few  failures,  has  more! 
than  once  begotten  panic  and  wide-spread  bankruptcy,  and 
would  now  extinguish  the  revenues  of  the  Government. 
Had  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  ascribed  the  fluctuations 
in  business  and  the  inordinate  prices  at  which  many  of  the 
necessaries  of  life  are  held  to  their  real  cause,  our  habit 
of  banking  on  accumulated  credits,  and  not  pressed  the 
purpose  of  contracting  the  currency,  the  country  would 
not  be  depressed  as  it  is.  Threatened  contraction  has 
hung  like  the  sword  of  Damocles  over  the  heads  of  our 
producing  classes. 

Let  me  ask,  what  is  currency  and  what  is  its  function  ? 
Currency  is  that  which  a  people  have  agreed  to  accept  and 
use  as  money.  It  is  the  medium  by  which  the  small  trans 
actions  of  daily  life  are  settled.  Its  sphere  is  that  of  per 
sonal  use  and  retail  trade.  Except  iii  the  final  settlements 
between  banks  and  their  customers,  it  is  not  commonly 
used  in  large  transactions.  We  carry  currency  upon  our 
persons  to  meet  current  demands.  You  find  it  in  the  till 
of  the  retail  dealer  and  the  hands  of  workmen,  who,  when 
currency  is  abundant,  are  paid  in  it,  and  not  in  orders  on 
stores  at  which  they  are  compelled  to  select  articles  from 
a  small  stock  of  inferior  goods  and  pay  high  prices  as  they 
do  when  currency  is  scarce.  It  is  possible  that  Mr. 
McCulloch  does  not  know  that  the  abundance  of  currency 
has  redeemed  our  laboring  people  from  the  exhausting 
taxation  inflicted  upon  them  by  the  order  system  and  pay 
ment  in  the  depreciated  paper  of  distant  and  unknown 


138  HOW    OUR   WAR    DEBT    CAN    BE    PAID. 

banks.  Currency  in  its  legitimate  use  has  no  wider  sphere 
than  I  have  indicated.  Like  all  other  blessings,  it  may  be 
perverted,  as  it  is  when  it  accumulates  as  deposits  in 
banks  and  is  used  as  the  basis  of  large  loans  to  adventur 
ous  speculators.  In  the  heavy  operations  of  business  cur 
rency  finds  no  place.  These  are  settled  by  checks,  drafts, 
and  bills  of  exchange.  Before  the  war  currency  was 
scarce,  and  the  deficiency  was  supplied  by  the  promissory 
notes  of  individuals  who,  by  endorsing  the  notes  of  those 
who  bought  from  them  or  those  of  their  factors  or  com 
mission  merchants,  became  debtors  to  the  amount  due 
them  from  others.  It  is  said  that  when  the  war  began  the 
amount  represented  by  the  promissory  notes  of  individuals 
was  more  than  $2,000,000,000  :  but  now  the  supply  of  cur 
rency  is  adequate,  few  men  take  such  notes,  and  none  pro 
pose  to  give  them  but  the  people  of  the  South,  who  have 
no  currency.  The  contraction  of  the  currency  insisted 
upon  by  Mr.  McCulloch  would  revive  the  credit  system, 
with  its  orders,  for  work  people,  and  its  periodical 
returns  of  wide-spread  bankruptcy  to  the  community  at 
large. 

I  do  not  think  the  Secretary  is  entirely  ignorant  of 
the  simple  truths  I  have  been  enunciating.  It  would  be 
pleasant  to  know  that  he  is,  for  it  is  not  agreeable  to  be 
constrained  to  doubt  the  motives  of  one  to  whom  we  have 
given  our  confidence.  But  in  view  of  the  communication 
made  by  Mr.  Nasby,  and  the  fact  that  the  Secretary's  the 
ories,  if  carried  into  execution,  will  promote  speculation, 
I  cannot  help  thinking  that  he  regards  banking  and  stock 
operations  as  the  interests  to  which  all  others  should  be 
subordinated.  He  recommends  the  withdrawal  of  the 
greenbacks  that  the  national  banks  may  supply  the  circu 
lating  medium  of  the  country,  and  he  wishes  each  national 
bank  to  be  compelled  to  deposit  in  one  of  the  Atlantic 
cities  a  sufficient  amount  of  its  capital  to  justify  the  re 
demption  of  its  notes  at  that  point.  The  Atlantic  city  to 
which  he  points  is  the  great  centre  of  banking  and  specu 
lation,  and  compliance  with  these  suggestions  would  ag 
gravate  the  speculative  power  of  New  York  by  the  pro 
portion  such  deposits  would  bear  to  its  general  fund.  His 
theories  are  in  perfect  accord  with  his  practice,  for  I  find 
that  he  is  in  the  habit  of  furnishing  the  banks,  and  through 
them  speculators,  an  average  loan  of  about  twenty-five 
million  dollars.  Thus  by  an  official  statement  which  lies 


HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID.  139 

before  me  it  appears  that  the  Government  balances  in  the 
hands  of  the  national  banks  was — 

June  1,  1866 $26,335,725.59 

July  1,  1866 34,124.171.21 

August  1,1866 36,931,415.22 

{  September  1, 1866 32,590,274.58 

October  1,  1866 30,976,979.85 

I  am,  however,  informed  officially  that  there  was  during 
those  months  a  liability  to  draft  on  these  balances  distri 
buted  through  not  less  than  three  months  amounting  in 
all  to  $14,000,000  by  coupons  in  transitu  or  in  the  hands 
of  the  holders ;  so  that  the  banks  could  with  safety  lend 
on  call  during  the  whole  period  $25,000,000  to  those  en 
gaged  in  speculating  in  food  and  increasing  its  price.  Had 
$20,000,000  of  the  sum  been  applied  to  the  absorption  of 
seven-thirties  or  compound-interest  notes  speculation  would 
have  been  less  rife,  our  interest  account  would  have  been 
materially  diminished,  and  a  slight  approximation  have 
been  made  towards  specie  payments  and  the  ultimate  re 
demption  of  the  public  debt.  Doubtless,  Mr.  McCulloch's 
desire  "to  keep  the  business  of  the  country  as  steady  as 
possible  "  alone  prevented  this  happy  consummation. 

Sir,  it  is  within  our  memory  that  the  establishment  of 
the  sub-Treasury — the  divorcement  of  the  public  Treas 
ury  from  the  banks  and  banking  system  of  the  country — • 
overthrew  the  administration  and  party  that  inaugurated 
it ;  but  it  is  also  remembered  that  so  beneficent  were  its 
operations  that  no  succeeding  administration  of  any  party 
dared  assail  it.  It  had  not  been  in  operation  a  year  till  it  had 
vindicated  its  wisdom  in  the  estimation  of  every  judicious 
business  man.  Nor  would  it  probably  ever  have  been  in 
terfered  with  in  time  of  peace.  The  great  convulsion 
which  threatened  to  divide  our  country  interrupted  its  ac 
tion,  which  should  forthwith  be  restored.  It  acted  as  a 
regulator,  a  natural  regulator,  of  the  trade  of  the  country. 
When  importations  ran  to  excess  and  unduly  increased 
the  public  revenues,  it  withdrew  from  circulation  and 
locked  up  a  portion  of  the  currency,  and  by  the  stringency 
thus  created  admonished  banks  and  business  men  to 
pause  ;  and  when,  having  given  an  early  check  to  rash 
operations  and  diminished  the  current  revenues  of  the 
country,  it  gently,  as  by  a  process  of  nature,  restored  vigor 
to  the  circulation  by  the  fact  that  its  payments  were  in  ex- 


140  HOW   OUR   WAR   DEBT    CAN   BE   PAID. 

cess  of  its  receipts,  as  its  receipts  bad  just  been  in  excess 
of  its  payments.  As  a  safeguard  for  the  public  funds,  if 
for  no  other  reason,  the  Secretary  should  have  recom 
mended  its  full  restoration,  for  during  the  entire  period  of 
its  existence,  as  far  as  I  know,  the  Government  did  not  lose 
by  any  of  its  officers  as  much  as  it  did  recently  by  the 
failure  of  the  Merchants'  National  Bank  of  Washington 
alone.  It  was  a  safe  depository  for  the  public  money,  as 
well  as  a  healthful  influence  in  the  business  operations  of 
the  country.  Had  the  Secretary  suggested  that  it  would 
answer  as  well  for  a  mixed  currency  as  it  did  for  the  era 
of  specie  payments,  and  recommended  its  immediate  rees- 
tablishment  he  would  have  done  much  to  give  steadiness 
to  the  business  of  the  country,  diminish  speculative  prices, 
quicken  production,  and  increase  the  revenue  of  the  coun 
try.  And  I  trust  that  Congress  before  it  rises  will  pass  a 
law  prohibiting  the  deposit  of  any  portion  of  the  Govern 
ment  funds  in  any  bank,  or,  in  other  words,  divorce  the 
Treasury  from  the  banks  by  reorganizing  the  sub- 
Treasury. 

It  was,  perhaps,  too  much  to  hope  for  such  a  recommen 
dation  from  the  Secretary.  He  enjoys  the  control  he  now 
exercises  over  the  business  of  the  country,  and  would  not 
willingly  surrender  it.  But  for  the  maintenance  of  an 
average  deposit  of  more  than  $30,000,000  could  the  Na 
tional-Union-Johnson  party  have  extorted  from  the  banks 
• — perhaps  not  directly  as  corporations,  but  from  their 
stockholders  and  officers,  to  be  accounted  for  in  the  item 
of  incidental  expenses — the  large  contributions  which  the 
newspapers  told,  us  certain  banks  were  forced  to  make  in 
aid  of  the  recent  effort  of  the  President  and  the  Secretary 
of  the  Treasury  to  subvert  the  popular  will  ?  But  this  was 
but  an  occasional  incident,  probably  never  to  occur  again ; 
for  I  believe  that  the  future  can  produce  to  our  country 
no  second  Andrew  Johnson,  or  that  should  it  contain 
within  its  womb  another  like  unto  him  he  will  be  unable 
to  find  creatures  to  sacrifice  their  own  convictions  and  the 
interests  of  the  country  for  the  poor  privilege  of  unwor 
thily  filling  high  places  in  a  great  Government.  That  of 
which  I  speak  is  the  influence  these  deposits,  coupled  with 
his  exclusive  control  of  the  gold  in  the  Treasury,  averag 
ing  about  one  hundred  million  dollars,  which  he  compla 
cently  calls  a  "  handsome  reserve  of  coin  in  the  Treasury," 
give  the  Secretary  over  the  business  of  the  country. 


HOW    OUR   WAR    DEBT    CAN    BE    PAID.  141 

Under  the  action  of  the  sub-Treasury,  as  I  have  shown, 
a  payment  of  money  by  the  Government  relieved  a  strin 
gent  money  market ;  but  how  is  it  now  ?  When  the  Sec 
retary  of  the  Treasury  is  sacrificing  such  immense  amounts 
of  interest  in  order  to  give  steadiness  to  business,  the  Gov 
ernment  deposits  are  loaned  by  the  banks  on  notes  of  short 
date  or  on  call ;  and  if  the  current  revenues  of  the  Gov 
ernment  be  in  excess  of  its  current  expenses,  as  they  have 
been  throughout  his  administration,  its  deposits  accumu 
late,  and  swell  the  volume  of  such  loans.  The  receipts  of 
the  Government  thus  aggravate  the  tendency  to  undue  ex 
pansion  ;  and  what  is  the  effect  when  it  is  required  to  use 
any  considerable  amount  of  its  deposits?  It  is  this:  the 
Secretary  notifies  the  banks  that  he  is  about  to  call  for  ten 
or  twenty  million  dollars;  and  the  banks,  not  knowing 
which  of  their  debtors  will  be  ready  and  who  may  be 
utterly  unable  to  pay,  notify  not  alone  borrowers  of  the  pre 
cise  amount  demanded  by  the  Secretary,  but  holders  of  five, 
six,  or  ten  times  the  amount.  Thus  that  which  should 
give  relief  to  the  market  becomes  an  exaggerated  cause  of 
contraction,  and  the  payment  of  $10,000,000  by  the  Gov 
ernment  is  made  to  interfere  with  business  operations  to 
the  amount  of  $100,000,000.  We  have  all  observed  this 
and  know  that  instead  of  being  a  natural  operation,  the 
effects  of  which  should  be  felt  beneficially,  each  payment 
of  any  considerable  sum  of  money  by  the  Government, 
after  a  long  line  of  deposits  has  accumulated,  produces  a 
perturbation  through  all  commercial  circles.  The  pay 
ment  of  but  $15,000,000  in  the  early  part  of  last  month 
came  near  producing  a  national  panic  and  damaged  the 
credit  of  leading  banks.  This  system  gives  the  Secretary 
despotic  control  over  the  markets  of  the  country,  and  his 
favorites  may  have  ascertained  practically,  as  did  Yoltaire, 
who  was  given  to  stock  speculations,  that  "it  is  a  good 
thing  to  have  a  friend  at  court "  through  whom  they  may 
learn  when  it  is  well  to  sell,  because  things  have  reached 
their  highest  price,  as  Government  is  about  doing  that 
which  should  establish  confidence,  but  which,  owing  to 
the  Secretary's  efforts  to  insure  steadiness  to  business,  will 
produce  consternation  if  not  panic  and  a  general  decline  in 
prices  ;  and  when  it  is  well  to  buy,  because  it  suits  the 
convenience  of  the  Government  to  make  another  large  and 
long  loan  to  the  banks.  Such  a  power  over  the  business 
of  the  country  should  be  vested  in  no  man  ;  and  I  chal- 


1-12       HOW  OUR  WAR  DEBT  CAN  BE  PAID. 

lenge  the  world  to  point  to  any  fact  in  the  official  career  of 
the  present  Finance  Minister  of  the  country  which  would 
induce  any  judicious  man  to  vest  it  in  him.  There 
certainly  is  nothing  in  the  suggestions  of  the  report 
which  I  am  considering  to  indicate  that  he  is  a  safe  deposi 
tory  for  so  useless,  so  wide-spread,  and  so  dangerous  a 
power. 

But,  Mr.  Chairman,  I  am  admonished  that  I  should  has 
ten  to  a  conclusion.  I  must,  however,  beg  the  committee 
to  bear  with  me  while  I  examine  briefly  another  of  Mr. 
McCulloch's  suggestions.  It  is  offered  as  a  specific  rem 
edy,  because  it  is  said  it  will  diminish  the  rate  of  interest 
on  our  loans  and  protect  us  against  the  direful  contingency 
of  the  bonds  bought  on  speculation  at  depreciated  rates 
coming  home  to  exhaust  our  specie  within  a  month  of  the 
day  on  which  we  are,  by  the  magical  agencies  suggested 
by  Mr.  McCulloch,  to  resume  specie  payments  within  two 
years.  It  is  characterized  by  the  candor  and  wisdom 
which  pervade  his  other  suggestions.  To  a  shrewd  man  of 
mere  practical  business  habits,  one  not  skilled  in  the  mys 
teries  of  "Ingeany  bankin',"  it  might  seem  to  be  some 
what  impracticable ;  and  the  country  regards  it  with  hu 
miliation  and  disgust.  It  is  this  :  that  after  having  carried 
on  the  war  without  an  appeal  to  foreign  nations  or  capi 
talists  and  without  their  sympathy  ;  after  having  by  our 
patriotic  sacrifices  put  our  credit  so  high  that  the  people 
of  Europe  have  voluntarily  come  and  parried  away,  with 
great  profit  to  themselves,  $350,000,000  of  our  bonds ; 
that  now,  when  peace  is  restored,  and  when  we  again  pos 
sess  the  custom-houses,  post  offices,  forts,  and  arsenals  of 
the  country,  and  when  our  taxes  are  not  divided  between 
our  Treasury  and  that  of  a  hostile  confederacy,  but  all 
flow  to  our  own,  we  shall  issue  "  bonds  payable  in  not  over 
twenty  years  and  bearing  interest  at  the  rate  of  not  over 
five  per  cent.,  payable  in  England  or  Germany,  to  an 
amount  sufficient  to  absorb  the  six  per  cent,  bonds  now 
held  in  Europe  and  to  meet  the  demand  there  for  actual 
and  permanent  investment." 

If  this  scheme  were  practicable,  I  for  one  would  spurn 
it.  With  their  pirate  ships  on  every  sea,  their  ship-yards 
and  factories  busy  in  fabricating  implements  of  war  for  our 
enemies,  and  in  the  face  of  their  hatred,  with  self-reliance, 
of  which  posterity  will  be  proud,  we  marched  steadily  on 
to  conquest  and  final  victory.  And  now,  in  the  hour  of 


HOW    OUR   WAR    DEBT    CAX   BE    PAID.  143 

our  triumph,  or  in  the  calm  season  which  should  succeed 
so  grand  and  successful  an  exhibition  of  power,  with  a 
continent  abounding  in  raw  material  for  the  profitable  em 
ployment  of  every  art,  trade,  and  mystery  known  to  ingeni 
ous  man  beneath  our  feet ;  with  India  decimated  by  famine, 
Europe  disturbed  by  wars  and  rumors  of  war,  Ireland  in 
incipient  rebellion ;  and  when  we  offer  to  the  people  of 
Europe  established  peace,  political  equality,  public  schools, 
a  free  church,  and  briefer  hours  of  labor  with  better  wages 
than  those  known  to  the  artisans  of  any  other  country, 
this  suggestion  is  as  degrading  as  it  is  inopportune.  Sir, 
nothing  but  some  such  folly  as  this  official  proclamation, 
as  it  would  be  regarded  by  the  people  of  Europe,  that  OUT 
struggle  exhausted  us,  and  that  with  victory  came  prema 
ture  decrepitude,  can  prevent  us  from  compelling  the  na 
tions  of  the  world,  by  the  tide  of  skilled  workmen  that 
will  flow  from  their  shores  to  ours,  to  follow  our  example 
and  give  those  who  produce  their  wealth  culture,  leisure, 
and  the  consciousness  of  free  manhood.  In  such  an  hour 
and  in  view  of  such  a  prospect  I  am  sure  that  Congress 
will  not  degrade  the  country  by  asking  the  money-chang 
ers  of  Europe  to  lighten  its  burdens  or  help  us  bear 
them. 

But  the  scheme  is  hopelessly  impracticable.  Mr.  Mc- 
Culloch  may  see  advantages  in  it  which  others  fail  to  detect. 
It  would  serve,  I  doubt  not,  by  what  he  calls  "the  trifling 
commissions  to  the  agents  through  whom  the  exchanges 
might  be  made,"  to  found  a  great  American  banking-house 
in  London  with  continental  branches,  and  might  bless  the 
country  with  the  hope  of  large  gratuities  from  some  future 
George  Peabody  whom  the  Secretary  would  designate  as 
the  agent  for  making  transfers  and  paying  interest ;  but  it 
would  not  accomplish  the  purpose  its  author  suggests. 
With  such  knowledge  of  human  nature  as  we  possess  let 
us  consider  the  proposition.  Those  who  hold  our  bonds 
bought  them  either  as  an  investment  or  on  speculation,  and 
the  interest  upon  them  ranges  from  six  to  seven  and  three- 
tenths  per  cent.  Is  it  probable  that  those  who  bought 
them  as  an  investment  will  change  them  before  maturity 
for  bonds  bearing  but  five  or  four  and  a  half  per  cent.  ? 
Or  will  those  who  bought  them  as  a  matter  of  speculation, 
in  view  of  the  Secretary's  assurance  that  in  less  than  two 
years  we  will  resume  specie  payments  and  enable  them  to 
convert  them  into  gold  at  par,  hasten  to  make  such  a  con- 


14:4  HOW    OUR   WAR   DEBT    CAN   BE   PAID. 

version  ?  When  the  leopard  shall  change  his  spots,  the 
vulture  protect  the  dove,  and  hungry  mice  abstain 
from  eating  unguarded  crackers  and  cheese,  I  will  be 
prepared  to  regard  the  Secretary's  proposition  as  practi 
cable. 

Nor  need  we  grieve  that  it  is  not  practicable.  Our  des 
tiny  is  written.  Unwise  legislation  or  such  reckless  mal 
administration  as  now  prevails  may  retard  it,  but  it  will 
be  achieved.  It  is  written  in  the  sublime  doctrine  of  hu 
man  equality,  which  gives  vitality  and  stability  to  our  in 
stitutions,  and  more  perceptibly  though  not  more  endur- 
ingly  in  the  geographical  position,  the  continental  propor 
tions,  and  the  unequaled  resources  of  our  country. 
Bounded  by  both  oceans,  with  a  larger  area  than  all  the 
nations  of  Europe,  including  Great  Britain,  which  lie  be 
tween  the  same  distant  parallels  of  latitude  that  mark  our 
limits,  and  embracing  mineral,  agricultural,  manufacturing, 
and  commercial  resources  greater  than  they  combined  pos 
sess,  the  United  States  must  be  the  foremost,  richest,  and 
most  powerful  nation  of  the  world.  However  blind  our 
Finance  Minister  may  be  to  this  fact,  others  perceive  it, 
and  our  affairs  will  yet  be  administered  in  accordance 
with  the  sublime  assertion  of  GortschakoflJ  who,  in  an 
utterance  to  which  I  have  already  referred,  when  speaking 
of  Eussia  and  our  country,  said :  "  God  has  given  to  the 
two  countries  such  conditions  of  existence  that  their  grand 
internal  life  is  enough  for  them." 

Yes,  the  capitalists  of  Europe  will  yet  be  eager  to  lend 
us  money  as  cheaply  as  they  now  loan  it  to  England  ;  but 
it  will  be  when,  by  the  conversion  of  our  now  profitless 
raw  material  into  fabrics,  by  the  skill  and  industry  of  our 
now  unemployed  citizens  and  the  millions  of  industrious 
people  who  are  coming  to  us  from  abroad,  we  manufac 
ture  more  than  we  consume,  and  by  rivalling  England, 
France  and  other  continental  nations  in  tropical  markets, 
and  those  of  other  non-manufacturing  regions,  shall  have 
turned  the  balance  of  trade  in  our  favor.  Then  Americans 
will  be  able  to  compete  with  foreigners  in  bidding  for  our 
loans ;  and  in  exchange  for  cotton,  tobacco,  and  other 
staples,  our  bonds  will  be  returned  to  us  instead  of  woolen 
goods  and  various  other  textile  and  metallic  fabrics,  which 
we  now  receive  but  ought  to  manufacture  for  ourselves. 
But  foreign  capitalists  will  not  take  bonds  from  us  at  four 
and  a  half  or  five  per  cent,  in  exchange  for  those  which 


HOW   OUR  WAR   DEBT   CAN   BE   PAID. 


145 


pay  six  per  cent.,  while  the  balance  of  trade  is  against  us 
to  the  amount  of  $100,000,000  per  annum,  and  with  com 
pound-interest  and  seven-thirty  notes  afloat  to  the  amount 
of  nearly  $1,000,000,000,  we  with  more  than  Gascon 
vanity  promise  the  almost  immediate  return  to  specie  pay 
ments. 

1C 


THE  SOUTH— ITS  RESOURCES  AND  WANTS. 


ADDRESS  DELIVERED  AT  NEW  ORLEANS, 

MAY  HTH,  1867 — As  REPORTED  IN  THE  NEW  ORLEANS 
REPUBLICAN. 

Fellow- Citizens  of  Louisiana:  In  response  to  the  invita 
tion  of  your  Governor  and  the  Mayor  of  this  beautiful  city, 
I  am  here  to  counsel  with  you  as  to  the  best  interests  of 
our  country.  Let  me,  however,  first  congratulate  you  upon 
your  enfranchisement,  and  thank  the  loyal  men  among  you, 
without  regard  to  race  or  color,  who  during  the  late  strug 
gle  braved  the  dangers  of  battle  in  defence  of  the  old  flag, 
or  quietly  remained  true  to  it  amid  the  dangers  which 
surrounded  you,  for  the  part  you  took  in  my  enfranchise 
ment.  Having  addressed  a  large  and  enthusiastic  audience 
in  Memphis  on  Tuesday  night,  and,  standing  in  the  midst 
of  this  brilliant  scene  in  the  city  of  New  Orleans,  I  am  at 
last  able  to  proclaim  that  I  am  a  free  man  in  my  native 
land,  and  may  traverse  its  wide  extent,  carrying  with  me 
my  conscience  and  convictions  without  fear  of  personal 
violence.  This  was  impossible  before  the  war.  The  in 
stitutions  of  the  South  were  not  cosmopolitan.  Her  pecu 
liar  system  of  labor  not  only  controlled  but  contracted  her 
civilization. 

Disregarding  the  practice  and  precepts  of  the  founders 
of  our  Government,  and  ignoring  the  admonitions  of  ex 
perience,  the  South  turned  a  deaf  ear  to  reason,  refused  to 
listen  to  remonstrance,  and  finally  punished  dissent  from 
her  judgment  as  a  crime  deserving  outlawry  and  death. 
Attempting  in  a  progressive  age,  and  in  a  land  of  vast  and 
varied  resources,  peopled  by  a  generation  more  enterprising 
than  any  that  had  preceded  it,  to  maintain  a  system  which 
was  "  peculiar,"  and  incapable  of  modification,  save  by  ab 
solute  overthrow,  she  arrayed  against  her  all  the  forces  of 
civilization.  No  poet  ever  sang  the  charms  of  slavery. 
No  limner  ever  embodied  its  beauties  on  canvas.  No  ora- 
146 


THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS.          147 

tor  ever  descanted  upon  its  blessings ;  and  though  dumb 
dogs  that  could  not  bark  proclaimed  from  many  a  pulpit 
the  duty  of  servants  to  obey  their  masters  as  the  sum  and 
substance  of  the  gospel,  the  voice  of  Christianity  bade  con 
scientious  men  do  unto  others  as  they  would  have  others 
do  unto  them — be  eyes  to  the  blind  and  feet  to  the  lame — 
and  the  cries  of  the  wronged  against  those  who  withheld 
from  the  laborer  his  hire,  ascended  incessantly  to  the  ears 
of  the  Lord  of  Sabaoth. 

To  this  attempt  on  the  part  of  the  people  of  the  South 
to  isolate  themselves,  to  exclude  from  their  broad  and  fer 
tile  territory  the  advancing  civilization  of  the  age,  may  be 
ascribed  the  terrible  war  through  which  we  have  just 
passed.  It  made  them  intensely  sectional,  while  the  steady 
development  of  the  North  was  demonstrating  to  its  more 
rapidly  increasing  millions  the  beneficence  of  nationality. 
It  created  a  separate  and  antagonistic  system  of  civiliza 
tion.  The  North  welcomed  all  classes  of  emigrants  from 
all  lands.  She  made  herself  familiar  with  the  inventions 
and  discoveries  of  the  day,  and  applied  them  to  purposes 
of  utility.  She  challenged  the  freest  discussion  of  all  topics 
and  all  systems.  She  provided  liberally  for  the  education 
of  all  her  people,  including  the  unhappy  few  to  whom,  in 
deference  to  Southern  demands,  she  denied  the  full  rights 
of  citizenship.  But  the  South,  wrapt  in  its  delusion,  re 
pulsed  emigration — rejected  all  science  and  literature  that 
controverted  the  divinity  of  slavery,  and  the  justice  and 
economy  of  unrequited  toil.  She  denied  to  her  laborers  edu 
cation,  and  consequently  could  not  avail  herself  of,  and  was 
indifferent  to  the  scientific  and  mechanical  progress  of  the 
age.  Thus,  while  the  breach  between  the  two  sections  was 
widening,  the  disparity  in  power  between  them  was  con 
stantly  increasing.  Contrast,  my  friends,  the  development 
of  the  two  sections ;  behold  the  great  cities  of  the  North. 
New  York,  with  its  environs,  which  are  really,  though  not 
municipally,  part  of  it,  already  exceeds  Paris  in  wealth, 
splendor,  trade,  and  population.  London  and  Paris  are  the 
only  trans-atlantic  cities  which  exceed  Philadelphia  in 
these  respects.  Boston,  Cincinnati,  Chicago,  and  other 
cities,  each  exceed  New  Orleans  in  population.  Yet  New 
Orleans,  past  which  the  waters  of  sixty  thousand  miles  of 
rivers  flow,  is  the  greatest  city  of  the  South. 

Let  me  illustrate  this  point  familiarly.  The  railroads 
connecting  New  York  with  Philadelphia,  and  Memphis 


148          THE   SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES   AND   WANTS. 

with  Grenada,  Mississippi,  differ  in  length  less  than  ten 
miles.  They  are  each  a  link  in  a  great  thoroughfare  North 
and  South.  Over  the  former  eight  passenger  trains  pass 
daily  each  way ;  each  train  is  made  up  of  several  cars. 
Over  the  latter  one  train  of  two  cars  passes  daily.  The 
fare  from  New  York  to  Philadelphia  is  $3  ;  but  from 
Memphis  to  Grenada  it  is  $8.  The  time  required  to  make 
the  journey  from  New  York  to  Philadelphia  is  less  than 
four  hours,  while  it  takes  six  and  a  half  hours  to  pass  be 
tween  Memphis  and  Grenada.  The  land  along  the  route, 
in  New  Jersey  and  Pennsylvania,  for  agricultural  purposes, 
is  worth  from  $250  to  $400  per  acre ;  that  along  the  other 
can  be  bought  from  $3  to  $20 ! 

These  contrasts  are  not  accidental  or  arbitrary.  They 
illustrate  great  principles — sleepless  laws  of  social  life. 

When  the  sages  of  76  proclaimed  that  all  men  are  born 
equal,  and  invested  by  nature  with  the  right  to  life,  liberty, 
and  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  they  uttered  the  law  that  was 
to  fashion  the  institutions  of  America,  and  shape  the  civi 
lization  of  her  people.  They  were  ever  true  to  that  law. 
They  controlled  the  States  at  the  time  they  framed  the 
Constitution  of  the  United  States ;  and  then  every  free 
man,  without  regard  to  color,  was  a  voter  in  every  State, 
except  South  Carolina ;  and  while  the  Executive  Govern 
ment  remained  in  their  hands,  and  their  personal  influence 
controlled  the  legislation  of  the  country,  the  free  colored 
man  was  not  denied  the  right  of  suffrage  under  any  Territo 
rial  Government.  Though  South  Carolina  had  steadily  de 
manded  his  exclusion  from  1778,  in  the  convention  for 
framing  articles  of  Confederation,  it  was  not  until  1812 
that  she  succeeded  in  inserting  the  word  white  in  a  law 
establishing  a  Territorial  Government.  That  word  appears 
for  the  first  time  in  the  law  establishing  the  Territory  of 
Missouri,  which  was  enacted  in  that  year. 

The  little  monosyllable  white,  embodied  in  that  law,  was 
the  germ  of  the  war  through  which  we  have  just  passed. 
It  involved  an  attempt  to  stay  the  course  of  American  civi 
lization — it  was  in  conflict  with  its  essential  law — the 
great  truth  to  which  I  have  alluded,  and  involved  strife 
between  the  spirit  of  liberty  and  the  impulse  of  the  masses 
on  one  hand,  and  the  grasping  selfishness  of  an  oligarchy 
and  the  wrongs  of  slavery  on  the  other.  From  that  time 
to  this  our  country  has  not  been  free  from  agitation ;  arid 
while  the  institutions  of  the  North  have  been  more  and 


THE    SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES   AND    WANTS.          149 

more  republicanized  by  the  spirit  of  democracy,  the  writ 
ten  law  of  the  land,  yielding  to  the  reactionary  spirit  which 
won  its  first  triumph  in  the  Missouri  contest,  has  been  con 
trolled  by  the  spirit  of  slavery,  and  been  marked  by  a  total 
disregard  of  the  vital  principle  of  our  Government.  Our 
Government  rests  on  two  great  sentiments — personal  lib 
erty  and  territorial  unity ;  and  any  law  which  restrained 
personal  liberty,  or  engendered  or  fostered  sectional  inter 
est,  was  a  necessary  cause  of  discord  and  strife.  When, 
therefore,  yielding  to  Southern  persuasion  or  dictation,  the 
North  consented  to  deprive  the  free  colored  man  of  suf 
frage  in  the  Territories ;  and  when,  under  the  same  influ 
ence,  State  after  State,  throughout  the  free  North,  made 
color  a  test  of  citizenship,  until  out  of  New  England,  citi 
zens  of  African  descent  were  everywhere  disfranchised, 
they  who  made  these  concessions  were  not,  as  they  be 
lieved,  cementing  the  Union,  but  making  war  inevitable 
Nations  are  not  the  creatures  of  chance.  God's  providence 
embraces  the  American  continent.  His  judgment  is  its 
final  law.  And  these  abandonments  of  the  principles  upon 
which  our  Government  was  based — which  had  been  rev 
erently  accepted  by  our  forefathers  as  in  harmony  with  His 
will — did  not  pass  without  His  notice.  Has  He  not  repealed 
all  these  reactionary  statutes,  and  by  His  breath  wiped  out 
these  modern  improvements  of  State  constitutions  ?  From 
the  firing  on  Sumter  to  the  surrender  of  the  armies  of  Lee 
and  Johnston,  He  was  teaching  us,  by  the  terrible  baptism 
of  battle  and  blood,  how  infinite  is  His  power  and  justice, 
and  how  easily  He  can  make  the  folly  and  madness  of  man 
to  praise  Him.  Had  the  South  been  national  and  truly 
democratic  as  the  North,  and  had  her  legislation  been  pro 
gressive,  slavery  would  have  gradually  disappeared,  and 
the  colored  population  of  the  country  have  been  absorbed 
into  its  citizenship  without  a  crisis,  and  almost  without 
special  notice.  But  that  was  not  to  be.  By  an  inscrutable 
law,  all  great  blessings  come  to  us  through  suffering. 
Blood  has  been  the  price  of  freedom  to  every  nation.  For 
it  is  the  same  with  nations  in  this  respect  as  with  individu 
als.  Who  can  tell  the  agony  that  is  requited  when  the 
mother  first  beholds  a  smile  play  over  the  face  of  her  sleep 
ing  infant  ?  It  is  to  the  garden  and  the  cross  that  we  go, 
in  sorrow  and  humility,  for  our  highest  hopes  and  most 
enduring  promises,  and  amid  the  tumult  and  tortures  of 
the  battle-field,  the  horrors  of  the  wreck  upon  the  mad- 


150          THE   SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES   AND    WANTS. 

dened  ocean,  or  the  wearying  sufferings  of  the  feverish  bed, 
we  pass  from  the  cares  of  life  to  the  beatitude  of  eternity. 
And,  as  Americans,  we  may  look  back  on  years  of  war, 
we  may  count  the  dead  of  the  contending  armies  at  nearly 
one  million,  and  behold  the  fairest  and  most  fertile  regions 
of  our  smiling  country,  your  own  lovely  South,  scarred 
and  desolated  by  war,  and  rejoice  that  the  agony  which 
was  to  purchase  our  country's  great  blessing  is  over. 
Henceforth  it  shall  be  the  boast  of  every  American  that 
though  his  country  embraces  all  climates,  from  the  sum 
mer  breezes  that  ever  linger  over  your  broad  Gulf  to  the 
wintry  winds  that  howl  the  requiem  of  gallant  navies  as 
they  sweep  over  the  mighty  lakes  of  the  North,  its  atmos 
phere  is  so  pure  that  no  slave  can  breathe  it  and  remain  in 
bondage.  [Immense  applause.] 

Let  me  not  be  misunderstood :  I  charge  this  war  not 
upon  the  South  alone.  It  is,  perhaps,  more  largely  due  to 
the  unprincipled  men  in  the  North,  who  should  have  met 
the  issue  at  the  threshold,  and  settled  the  question  while  it 
was  susceptible  of  legislative  control,  than  to  the  men  of 
the  South,  who,  prompted  by  the  short-sighted  demands 
of  present  interest,  insisted  upon  concessions  which  saga 
cious  men  of  principle  would  not  have  accorded.  Let  me 
illustrate :  No  statesman  had  denied  that  slavery  in  the 
Territories  was  the  subject  of  Congressional  legislation 
until  John  C.  Calhoun  introduced  into  the  Senate,  on  the 
19th  of  February,  1847,  three  resolutions,  embodying  mere 
abstract  propositions,  the  last  of  which  was  as  follows : 

"That  the  enactment  of  any  law  which  should,  directly  or  by  its 
effects,  deprive  the  citizens  of  any  State  of  this  Union  from  emigra 
ting  with  their  property  into  any  of  the  Territories  of  the  United 
States,  will  make  such  discrimination,  and  would,  therefore,  be  a  vio 
lation  of  the  Constitution  and  the  rights  of  the  States  from  which 
such  citizens  emigrate,  and  in  derogation  of  that  perfect  equality 
which  belongs  to  them  as  members  of  this  Union,  and  would  tend 
directly  to  subvert  the  Union  itself." 

The  object  of  these  resolutions  was  to  extend  slavery 
over  the  almost  boundless  territory  then  belonging  to  the 
United  States.  So  repugnant  was  the  proposition  to  the 
members  of  the  Senate,  largely  Democratic,  and  with  no 
Kepublican  member  in  it,  that  Mr.  Calhoun  did  not  dare 
press  his  resolutions  to  a  vote. 

In  May,  1848,  the  Democratic  party  met  in  convention 


THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND  WANTS.          151 

at  Baltimore,  and  Mr.  Yancej,  Calhoun's  great  disciple, 
submitted  the  following : 

"  Resolved,  That  the  doctrine  of  non-interference  with  the  rights 
of  property  of  any  portion  of  this  Confederation,  be  it  in  the  States 
or  Territories,  by  any  other  than  the  parties  introduced  in  them,  is 
the  true  Republican  doctrine  recognized  by  this  body." 

There  were  282  members  in  that  convention.  The 
South  was  fully  represented.  But  so  novel  and  dangerous 
was  this  doctrine  then  considered  that  every  delegate  from 
the*North  and  most  of  those  from  the  South  united  in  de 
manding  a  direct  vote  upon  the  question,  that  they  might 
send  to  the  people  of  the  country  an  expression  of  their 
abhorrence  of  the  new  and  dangerous  dogma.  But  about 
one  in  every  eight  delegates  was  then  prepared  to  sustain 
it,  the  vote  upon  it  being  36  for  and  246  against.  But  be 
hold  the  sequel :  In  less  than  twelve  years  the  unprinci 
pled  men  who  governed  the  Democratic  party  brought  on 
the  fierce  struggles  in  Kansas  by  accepting  the  doctrine 
they  had  thus  promptly  spurned,  and  persuading  the 
Southern  people  that  the  North  had  abandoned  the  faith 
of  the  Fathers,  and  was  in  reckless  disregard  of  the  re 
straints  of  the  Constitution  robbing  them  of  their  rights. 
Impelled  by  ambition,  and  seeking  wealth  through  the  in 
trigues  of  a  corrupt  political  era,  they  encouraged  you  to 
prepare  for  war.  They  assured  you  that  if  you  would 
strike  for  your  supposed  rights  they  would  stand  by  you 
on  the  battle-field,  as  they  had  done  in  caucuses,  conven 
tions,  and  on  the  floor  of  Congress. 

I  have  seen  a  copy  of  a  letter  from  one  of  them  who  had 
once  filled  the  Presidential  chair,  saying  to  you,  through 
one  of  your  leaders,  that  if  you  seceded  there  would  be  no 
war  ;  or  that  if  there  were  it  would  be  co-extensive  with 
the  country,  and  blood  would  flow  in  every  village,  town, 
and  city  of  the  North. 

How  little  Franklin  Pierce  knew  the  real  spirit  of  the 
people  among  whom  he  lived !  How  ignorant  was  he  of 
the  fact  that  the  world  is  under  moral  government  1  Were 
his  pledges  kept  ?  In  what  city  of  the  North  did  blood 
flow  ?  Between  the  citizens  of  which  Northern  States  was 
there  armed  collision  ;  and  from  which  of  the  Northern 
States  did  men  swarm  to  swell  the  ranks  of  the  Confederate 
armies  ?  As  the  echo  of  the  guns  fired  upon  the  flag  over 
Sumter  reverberated  through  the  glens  and  valleys  of  the 


152  THE   SOUTH — ITS   KESOURCES   AND   WANTS. 

North  and  swept  over  the  broad  prairies  of  the  distant 
Northwest,  these  same  false  and  unprincipled  friends  of  the 
South,  in  obedience  to  the  demands  of  popular  sentiment, 
flung  to  the  breeze,  at  their  dwellings  and  places  of  busi 
ness,  the  resplendent  flag  of  the  Union ;  and,  with  Fer 
nando  Wood  at  their  head,  made  themselves  prominent  in 
the  work  of  recruiting  and  organizing  troops  for  your  sub 
jugation.  How  did  they  aid  you?  The  whole  North 
gave  you  two  soldiers  whose  names  are  known — Gustavus 
W.  Smith  and  Mansfield  Lovell!  Can  any  of  you  name  a 
third?  [Shouts  of  "no,  no."]  I'll  tell  you  what  they 'did 
give  you,  though.  They  gave  you  what  the  little  girl, 
who  was  asked  to  contribute  the  value  of  the  sugar  she  used 
to  the  missionary  cause,  gave.  She  replied,  "No,  grandpa, 
I  don't  think  I  can  do  that ;  but  I'll  tell  you  what  I  will 
do.  I'll  give  the  cause  my  prayers."  [Laughter.]  They 
gave  your  cause  their  prayers,  and,  as  if  fearing  they  might 
prove  effective,  hastened  to  meet  their  neighbors  and  swear 
they  had  done  no  such  thing !  [Immense  cheering.]  A 
hopeless  minority  in  Congress  throughout  the  war,  unable 
to  influence,  much  less  to  control  a  single  act  of  legislation, 
they  made  speeches  for  distribution  through  the  South,  as 
if  to  encourage  you  in  your  hopeless  struggle,  so  that  when 
it  ended  you  should  be  utterly  exhausted.  In  so  far,  his 
tory  will  hold  the  North — especially  the  Democratic  party 
of  the  North — responsible  for  the  war. 

Still,  the  million  of  graves,  in  which  sleep  the  best  and 
bravest  of  both  sections,  are  chargeable  to  the  South.  It 
withdrew  the  questions  involved  from  the  forum  of  diplo 
macy  and  legislation,  and  submitted  them  to  war's  last 
dread  arbitrament.  To  prepare  the  way  for  this,  its  con 
trolling  spirits  had  kept  the  mass  of  the  people  in  profound 
and  degrading  ignorance.  Each  State  having  received 
large  grants  of  land  for  educational  purposes,  none  of  them 
had  provided  schools  for  the  people.  The  laws  of  each 
State  prohibited,  by  penal  statutes,  the  education  of  the 
slave  population.  This  was  inevitable.  Intelligence  and 
culture  are  incompatible  with  slavery ;  the  penalty  God 
attaches  to  the  crime  of  holding  a  brother  in  bondage  is 
that  he  who  is  so  held  shall  be  of  little  value  to  him  who 
holds  him  ;  and  sluggish  indolence  is,  like  ignorance,  the 
inevitable  law  of  slavery.  The  absence  of  schools,  the 
want  of  diversified  fields  of  employment,  degraded  the 
non-slaveholding  whites  of  the  South,  and  the  most  enter- 


THE   SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES   AND   WANTS.  153 

prising  of  them  left  the  land  of  their  birth  to  find  happier 
homes.  Thus  the  South,  whose  great  need  was  popula 
tion  to  develop  her  vast  and  varied  resources,  and  build  up 
cities,  towns,  and  villages  along  her  great  lines  of  transit, 
and  thus  increase  the  value  of  her  lands  and  diminish  the 
cost  of  travel  and  transportation,  was  constantly  expelling 
her  own  children.  Nor  did  she  welcome  emigration.  The 
German,  the  Irishman,  the  Englishman,  and  the  Scotchman 
quit  the  scenes  of  their  childhood  and  the  graves  of  their 
fathers  in  pursuit  of  liberty  and  a  higher  degree  of  physi 
cal  comfort  than  is  accorded  the  laboring  man  in  those 
lands.  In  their  native  homes  they  learn  that  in  the  North 
there  is  political  equality  for  all,  and  that  every  fair  day's 
work  done  by  man,  woman,  or  child,  is  assured  by  the  law 
of  the  land  a  fair  day's  wages ;  and  that  westward,  to  the 
last  frontier,  there  is  no  village,  however  small,  in  which 
the  free  school  is  not  open  to  every  child.  Thus  attracted, 
they  have  come  to  the  North  and  West  by  millions.  The 
immigration  last  year  numbered  more  than  300,000,  and 
added  a  sum  greater  than  the  total  of  our  national  debt 
to  the  wealth  of  the  people  whose  numbers  they  swelled. 
I  found  this  morning  that  I  had  with  me  by  accident,  a 
copy  of  an  address  made  to  my  neighbors,  October 
3d,  1856,  from  which,  if  it  be  only  to  show  you  that  I 
teach  no  new  doctrine,  I  beg  leave  to  submit  a  brief  ex 
tract  : 

"  I  have  another  set  of  illustrations  to  give  you,  and  I  now  speak 
not  of  slaves,  but  of  the  free  white  men  of  the  South.  Men  love 
their  homes  ;  the  place  of  their  birth  ;  the  institutions  under  which 
they  pass  happy  childhood,  prosperous  youth,  and  enter  into  a  suc 
cessful  career  of  manhood.  There  are  thirteen  millions  of  Northen 
men  from  whom  emigrants  might  go,  while  there  are  but  six  mil 
lions  of  free  people  in  the  South,  yet  the  census  of  1850  found 
609,371  persons  who  were  born  in  the  slave  States  living  in  the 
free  States,  while  only  206,638  persons  born  in  the  free  States  were 
living  in  the  slave  States.  Yes,  my  fellow-citizens,  in  1850  there 
were  609,371  men  and  women  of  Southern  birth  living  in  the 
Northern  States  ;  they  had  fled  from  the  blessings  of  labor  owned 
by  capital.  But  you  may  say,  '  they  had  come  to  the  cities  to  en 
gage  in  commerce  ;  had  come  to  pursue  the  arts  in  Philadelphia, 
New  York,  Boston;  had  come  to  find  employment  in  all  the  vari 
ous  pursuits  of  our  great  cities.'  Let  us  see,  therefore,  how  many 
people  born  in  the  planting  States  had  emigrated  into  two  States  of 
the  North — Indiana  and  Illinois — in  which  there  are  no  great  cities  ; 
in  which  you  may  say  there  are  no  universities  ;  in  which  the  arts 
have  scarcely  been  developed ;  in  which  commerce  has  scarcely  a 
footing ;  which  are  two  of  the  young  grazing  and  grain-growing 


15-i          THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS. 

States  of  the  North.*  In  1850  there  were  in  those  two  States  47,026 
who  had  emigrated  from  North  Carolina,  8,231  from  South  Caro 
lina,  2102  from  Georgia,  45.037  from  Tennessee,  1730  from  Alabama, 
777  from  Mississippi,  701  from  Louisiana,  107  from  Texas,  44  from 
Florida  ;  making  the  total  of  those  who  had  left  these  nine  planting 
States  to  go  to  those  two  agricultural  and  grazing  States,  105,755." 

Do  you  reproach  me  and  others  of  the  North  that  we 
did  not  in  those  days  come  and  lay  these  arguments  before 
you  ?  Ah,  my  friends,  you  forget  the  terrible  despotism 
you  had  established  over  yourselves.  The  fact  that  I  en 
tertained  the  opinions  I  am  expressing  made  the  climate 
south  of  the  Potomac  and  Ohio  so  insalubrious  for  me 
that  I  did  not  dare  breathe  it  for  an  hour.  When  you 
raised  the  cry  of  abolitionist  against  a  Northern  man, 
beings,  with  hearts  as  unrelenting  as  the  blood-hound,  pur 
sued  him  to  his  death.  Not  only  did  you  prohibit  men 
who  would  have  gladly  sat  with  you  at  your  hearthside 
and  taken  sweet  counsel  with  you,  from  entering  your 
beautiful  region,  but,  through  the  arts  of  your  politicians 
and  the  demagoguery  of  the  Democratic  leaders  of  the 
North,  you  hunted  them  to  their  very  homes.  While  de 
livering  the  very  address  from  which  I  have  read  to  you, 
a  shower  of  eggs  was  hurled  at  me  by  pro-slavery  Demo 
crats  ;  and  my  only  consolation  was  to  thank  God  that  the 
American  Eagle  laid  fresh  eggs  at  that  season  of  the  year. 
[Great  laughter  and  applause.]  Nor  was  this  conduct  as- 
cribable  to  individuals  only.  The  State  of  South  Caro 
lina  seized  from  the  deck  of  their  vessels  colored  citizens 
of  other  States  who  chanced  to  enter  the  ports  of  that 
State,  and  incarcerating  them  as  felons,  made  them  charge 
able  with  costs  and  jail  fees,  and  in  default  of  the  pay 
ment  of  these,  sold  them  and  their  posterity  as  slaves. 
And  when,  what  Southern  men  called  the  Sovereign  State 
of  Massachusetts,  sent  one  of  her  ablest  and  most  venera 
ble  lawyers  to  raise  the  question  of  law  arising  out  of  this 
conduct,  before  a  South  Carolina  court,  the  people  of 
Charleston — not  the  roughs,  but  those  who  could  do  such 
an  act  with  highest  courtesy — the  very  pinks  of  the  chiv 
alry  of  that  city,  gave  that  distinguished  man  and  the  ac 
complished  daughter  that  accompanied  him  the  option  of 
departure  from  the  city  in  twenty-four  hours  or  tar  and 
feathers  and  jolly  rides  on  rails.  Again,  it  is  known  to 

*  It  must  be   remembered   that  these  remarks  were  made  in    1856,  and  are 
wholly  inapplicable  to  those  progressive  States  now. 


THE    SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES    AND   WANTS.  155 

all  the  North,  though  perhaps  you  may  not  be  awaro  of 
the  fact,  that  the  State  of  Georgia,  by  solemn  act  of  her 
Legislature  approved  by  the  Governor,  and  to  be  found 
among  her  printed  laws — offered  a  reward  of  five  or 
twenty  thousand  dollars,  I  forget  which,  for  the  body,  dead 
or  alive,  of  a  citizen  of  Massachusetts,  who  had  never  en 
tered  that  State,  or  been  so  far  South  as  the  capital  of  his 
country  ;  but  who  had  had  the  temerity  to  publish,  through 
the  columns  of  his  own  paper,  his  disbelief  in  the  divinity 
of  slavery,  and  an  assertion  of  the  right  of  every  woman  to 
the  possession  of  the  body  of  every  living  child  that  had 
cost  her  the  pangs  of  maternity.  You  treated  difference 
of  opinion  as  the  most  heinous  of  crimes ;  and  from  each 
and  all  of  the  Southern  States,  native  citizens,  and  some  of 
them  men  of  just  distinction,  were  driven  by  threats  of 
popular  violence.  Such  was  the  case  with  the  Grimkes, 
of  South  Carolina;  Underwood,  of  Virginia;  and  Helper 
and  Professor  Hedrick,  of  North  Carolina.  "Why  did 
we  not  come  and  reason  with  you?  Do  you  forget 
that  you  would  not  receive  nor  permit  your  neighbors  to 
receive,  through  the  post-office,  any  papers  or  periodical 
that  did  not  pander  to  your  prejudices?  The  receipt 
through  the  post-office  of  the  Liberator,  the  Anti- Slavery 
Standard,  the  Independent,  the  New  York  Tribune,  or  any- 
leading  Republican  paper,  by  one  of  your  neighbors, 
branded  him  as  an  Abolitionist,  and  rendered  his  life  inse 
cure  among  yon.  The  North  would  gladly  have  discussed 
the  question.  It  opened  its  public  halls  to  your  orators, 
and  its  people  swarmed  to  hear  them.  It  received  your 
papers,  and  its  conscientious  people  were  amazed  at  the 
infatuation  which  was  driving  the  two  sections  headlong 
into  war.  But  I  come  not  to  bandy  crimination  or  recrim 
ination  with  you.  There  is  "  ample  room  and  verge 
enough "  for  that  between  you  and  the  leaders  of  the 
Democracy  of  the  North.  But  for  myself  and  the  Repub 
lican  party,  I  say  :  shake  not  your  gory  locks  at  us,  for 
you  cannot  say  we  did  it.  You  spurned  our  counsels ; 
and  though  we  would  gladly  have  embraced  you  as 
brothers,  you  refused  to  listen  to  our  fraternal  prayers. 

Happily,  these  things  belong  to  the  past.  Having  en 
dured  the  agony  of  four  years  of  war,  conducted  with  un 
equalled  valor,  and  on  a  scale  of  unequalled  magnitude,  we 
rise  as  a  new  nation,  to  perfect  the  continental  temple  of 
freedom  and  equality,  the  foundations  of  which  were  so 


156  THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS. 

wisely  laid  by  our  forefathers.  From  those  foundations 
we  have  removed  the  only  two  faulty  stones — those  on 
which  were  inscribed  the  fatal  words,  Compromise  and 
Slavery.  ^In  all  this  broad  land  no  man  now  owns  his 
brother  man.  [Sensation.]  You,  men  of  color — you  citi 
zens  of  Louisiana,  who  wear  the  livery  of  Afric's  bur 
nished  sun — give  thanks  unto  God  that  he  has  turned  and 
overturned,  until  the  humblest  of  you  stands  erect  in  the 
majesty  of  free  manhood,  the  equal  of  your  fellow  man 
before  the  laws  of  your  country,  as  you  are  before  the 
beneficent  Father  of  all. 

He  guided  the  pen  of  Abraham  Lincoln  while  writing 
the  proclamation  of  emancipation.  [Great  enthusiasm  and 
applause.]  And  they  who  enacted  the  civil  rights  bill  and 
the  military  bill,  to  secure  the  enforcement  of  its  provi 
sions,  went  reverently  to  Him  for  counsel,  and  recognized 
His  sovereign  presence  as  in  their  midst.  The  charter  of 
your  freedom  is  from  Him.  Freedom  is  His  last,  best 
blessing  to  you.  Maintain  it  by  sleepless  vigilance,  and  by 
any  requisite  sacrifice  ;  for  in  surrendering  it  you  will  be 
alike  recreant  to  man  and  God.  See  to  it,  that  a  common 
school  system,  broad  enough  as  is  that  of  the  North,  to 
embrace  every  child  born  in  the  Commonwealth,  or  brought 
into  it  by  emigration,  is  established  by  the  constitution 
soon  to  be  framed  for  your  State.  See  to  it,  that  the  press 
is  free ;  and  be  tolerant  of  opinion,  for  by  the  collision  of 
opinion  is  the  truth  elicited.  Welcome  among  you  the 
people  of  every  clime  and  nation ;  and  remember  that  the 
prosperity  of  the  State  is  but  the  aggregate  prosperity  of 
the  individual  citizens  thereof.  Will  you  not  do  this? 
[We  will,  yes,  yes.]  I  know  you  will.  And  as  this  as 
surance  thrills  me,  I  behold  a  vision  grander  than  that  of 
Columbus ;  for  I  know  that  behind  the  islands  that  inter 
rupted  his  Western  voyage  to  the  Indies  lies  a  broad  con 
tinent,  sweeping  from  the  rock-bound  coast  of  the  storm- 
lashed  Atlantic  to  the  golden  shores  of  the  sleeping  Pacific. 
[Applause.]  And  that  from  the  Rio  Grande  to  the  per 
petual  snows  of  Mount  Hood,  it  is  inhabited  by  one  peo 
ple,  who,  though  differing  in  origin,  are  homogeneous  in 
language,  thought  and  sentiment;  and  who,  though  the 
citizens  of  many  States,  each  having  its  own  constitution, 
recognize  as  supreme  one  government,  and  that  the  freest 
yet  devised  by  man.  [Applause.]  I  cannot  better  illus 
trate  the  value  of  this  unity  than  by  pointing  to  the  future 


THE   SOUTH — ITS  RESOURCES  AND  WANTS.  157 

of  your  own  beautiful  city.  It  is  the  entrepot  for  the  com 
merce  of  the  Gulf,  the  trade  of  which  proceeds  under  our 
bright  flag.  The  river  that  winds  around  you  carries  to 
the  sea  the  waters  of  sixty  thousand  miles  of  river  course. 
The  valley  it  drains  will  sustain  a  population  of  five  hun 
dred  millions  of  people.  They  will  be  free,  intelligent, 
enterprising,  and  given  to  commerce ;  and  your  city  will 
be  the  centre  of  their  great  commercial  exchanges.  [A  p- 
plause.]  But  as  I  look  through  the  vista  of  a  brief  future, 
the  glories  of  the  great  cities  of  antiquity  fade  away,  and 
Florence,  Venice  and  Genoa,  recur  to  me  as  but  so  many 
distant  villages.  Not  Paris  or  London  will  be  your  equal ; 
for  behind  each  of  them  lies  a  territory  less  in  extent  and 
resources  than  any  one  of  a  score  of  American  States  ; 
while  behind  New  Orleans  lie  the  resources — agricultural, 
mineral  and  manufacturing — of  a  territory  broader  and 
richer  than  all  Europe,  and  a  people  destined  at  no  distant 
day  to  be  more  numerous  than  the  people  of  Europe.  And 
when  those  days  shall  come,  loyal  men  of  Louisiana,  the 
name  of  Abraham  Lincoln  will  be  uttered  with  reverence 
by  every  lip,  and  all  men  will  give  thanks  to  God  that  He 
so  ordered  His  providence  as  to  establish  political  equality 
throughout  the  enduring  Union  of  American  States. 
[Tremendous  applause  followed  this  eloquent  reference  to 
the  man  whom  all  in  the  audience  delight  to  hear  spoken 
of.]  My  colored  friends,  permit  me  to  thank  you  for  the 
enthusiasm  with  which  you  greeted  my  advent  among 
you.  If  at  any  time  I  have  suffered  for  you,  you  have 
abundantly  rewarded  me  by  this  exhibition  of  your  gene 
rous  appreciation.  Permit  me  now  to  address  a  few  re 
marks  more  especially  to  those  who  have  not  known  as  you, 
the  woes  of  slavery  or  the  consequences  of  disfranchise- 
ment  under  popular  government.  My  white  fellow-citi 
zens,  let  me  say  to  you  that  you  are  charged  with  a  duty 
grander  than  is  often  confided  to  a  generation  of  men. 
You  are  to  unite  with  those  whom  through  life  you  have 
been  taught  to  despise  as  an  inferior  race,  in  organizing  a 
party  in  Louisiana  in  harmony  with  the  great  Republican 
party  of  the  North.  That  party  is  based  on,  vivified  and 
cemented  by  two  sentiments,  love  for  the  Union,  and  devo 
tion  to  human  freedom.  Its  whole  creed  may  be  summed 
up  in  the  phrase,  perfect  and  indestructible  unity  of  the 
States,  with  the  perpetual  maintenance  of  the  largest  lib 
erty  of  the  individual  citizen,  consistent  with  the  general 


158  THE   SOUTH — ITS  KESOUBCES  AND  WANTS. 

welfkre.  If  you  fail  to  give  full  scope  and  power  to  either 
of  these  sentiments,  you  will  in  so  far  fall  short  of  the  due 
performance  of  your  mission.  Justice  is  blind,  and  knows 
no  color;  and  justice  is  the  law  of  the  Kepublican  party. 
In  enfranchising  our  fellow  citizens  of  African  descent  we 
must  accept  them  as  entitled  to  all  the  rights,  privileges, 
and  amenities  of  citizenship.  We  must  not  give  a  mere 
intellectual  assent  to  the  propositions  on  which  we  base 
our  action ;  but  accept  them  as  animating  and  controlling 
sentiments.  Eights  not  guaranteed  by  daily  practice  are 
not  secured.  Established  habit  is  the  only  sure  safeguard 
of  personal  liberty  in  our  land.  The  Constitution  of  the 
United  States  has  always  guaranteed  to  every  citizen  the 
rights,  privileges,  and  immunities  of  citizenship  to  the 
citizens  of  each  State  in  the  several  States ;  but  when,  be 
fore  this  war,  was  I,  or  men  who  hold  opinions  in  common 
with  me,  safe  in  attempting  to  exercise  that  constitutional 
right  in  any  slave  State?  As  I  have  shown  you,  dominant 
sentiment  may  override  constitutional  and  legal  provisions. 
Eest  not,  therefore,  your  experiment  upon  the  embodiment 
in  constitution  or  law  of  abstract  principles;  but  see  to  it 
that  they  are  embodied  practically  in  the  organization  of 
primary  caucus  and  convention,  and  ultimate  organization 
of  parish,  city,  and  State.  If  you  rise  to  the  prompt  ac 
complishment  of  this  great  work  the  day  of  strife  will  have 
passed,  and  the  American  sword  may  be  beaten  into  a 
ploughshare.  A  homogeneous  people,  bound  together  by 
the  immense  diversity  of  their  varied  interests,  by  the  most 
unrestrained  personal  intercourse  and  the  freest  inter 
change  of  thought  through  a  free  press,  will  find  no  issues 
that  legislation  or  diplomacy  may  not  settle.  And  a  nation 
that,  in  its  infancy,  put  into  the  field,  and  kept  there  for 
four  years,  during  which  the  bloodiest  and  best-contested 
battles  of  history  were  fought,  armies  each  numbering 
more  than  a  million  of  men,  need  fear  no  foreign  war.  [Ap 
plause.]  The  prestige  of  this  war  is  at  the  back  of  our 
European  diplomacy,  and  if  we  listen  to  the  voice  of  rea 
son  in  our  demands,  American  questions  will  be  matters 
of  easy  and  speedy  solution  by  the  courts  of  Europe.  Let 
us,  then,  not  grieve  over  the  past,  but  bating  no  jot  of 
heart  or  hope  move  onward  in  our  great  work,  iJnd  the 
struggling  millions  of  Europe  will  find  encouragement  in 
our  labors,  and  innumerable  posterity  will  rise  to  revere 
our  country's  flag,  and  call  those  who  fell  martyrs  in  its 


THE   SOUTH— ITS   RESOURCES   AXD   WANTS.  159 

maintenance,  and  those  who  through  the  civil  strife  com 
pleted  their  work,  blessed  among  men.  [Long  and  con 
tinued  applause.] 


ADDRESS  AT  MONTGOMERY,  ALABAMA. 

MAY,  16TH,   1867,  AS  EEPORTED  IN  THE  MONTGOMERY 

SENTINEL. 

I  HAVE  not  come  into  your  State,  fellow-citizens  of  Ala 
bama,  for  the  purpose  of  fomenting  discord  between  classes 
or  races,  or  States  or  sections,  but  in  the  hope  that  possibly 
by  some  poor  service  I  may  heal  the  wounds  of  my  bleed 
ing  country,  and  promote  the  welfare  of  all  her  citizens. 
We  have  gone  through  a  war  unparalleled  in  history  by 
the  breadth  of  its  theatre,  the  number  and  valor  of  its 
armies,  and  the  results  of  which  in  the  long  future  of  our 
country  are  destined  to  be  more  beneficent  than  those  of 
any  other  war.  While  we  rejoice  +,hat  it  is  over,  and  de 
plore  the  fact  that  it  could  not  hav3  been  averted,  we  have 
the  satisfaction  of  knowing  that  the  sufferings  attendant 
upon  it  mark  the  birth  of  a  new  and  grander  nation  that 
the  world  has  yet  seen.  I  know  not  why  it  is,  nor  can 
philosophers  divine,  that  Providence  has  decreed  that  all 
our  great  blessings  shall  be  purchased  by  suffering.  As  I 
remarked  the  other  evening  in  New  Orleans,  a  mother  onlv 
can  tell  the  pains  and  agonizing  doubts  that  are  requited 
by  the  first  smiles  which  play  over  the  face  of  her  sleeping 
infant.  It  is  through  the  storm  of  battle,  the  horrors  of 
shipwreck  upon  the  tempest-tossed  ocean,  or  the  weary 
pains  of  protracted  sickness,  that  we  pass  from  the  woes  of 
life  to-  the  bliss  of  immortality  ;  and  we  go  to  the  garden, 
the  agony  and  the  cross,  for  our  highest  and  most  endur 
ing  hopes.  Let  us,  therefore,  hope  that  in  this  war  we 
have  gone  through  the  throes  of  the  birth  of  a  new  and 
nobler  nation. 

I  have  travelled  from  my  distant  home  as  far  South  as 
New  Orleans,  and  thence  hither,  and  from  the  time  that  I 
passed  the  Ohio  I  have  been  constantly  and  painfully  im 
pressed  with  the  difference  between  the  country  and  the 
condition  of  the  people  South  of  that  river  and  the  Poto 
mac,  and  those  to  the  North  of  them.  The  results  are 


160  THE   SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES   AND    WANTS. 

apparent.  But  the  causes  of  the  contrast  lie  deeper  than  you 
think.  You  ascribe  them  to  the  war,  but  they  existed  be 
fore  the  war  began.  Nature  has  been  more  profusely 
]avish  of  her  gifts  to  you  throughout  the  whole  broad 
South  than  to  us.  You  have  natural  wealth  in  infinite  abun 
dance  and  variety ;  but  much  of  our  land  is  sterile,  and 
throughout  the  North  man  has  to  toil  for  every  dollar  he  gets. 
Our  labor  is  more  diversified  and  is  gentler  than  that  of  your 
mere  laborers  in  the  field ;  and  in  spite  of  your  greater 
natural  wealth  our  people  are  richer  than  yours,  are  better 
educated,  and  enjoy  more  of  the  conveniences,  comforts, 
and  luxuries  of  life  than  have  ever  been  accessible  to  the 
people  of  the  South. 

Alabama  has  more  natural  wealth  than  all  the  New  En 
gland  States  together.  Alabama  abounds  in  iron,  while 
New  England  is  without  any,  save  a  little  bed  of  ore  on 
the  borders  of  Connecticut  and  Massachusetts,  so  small 
that  it  would  scarcely  be  noticed  amid  the  broad  veins  of 
heaven-enriched  Alabama.  She  has  no  coal,  while  coal  and 
limestone  in  immense  deposits  lie  in  close  proximity  to 
your  beds  of  iron  ore.  New  England  can  grow  but  little 
wheat,  corn  or  rye.  So  thin  and  sterile  is  the  soil  of 
Massachusetts  in  many  places  that  her  people  sow  rye,  not 
for  the  grain  but  the  straw,  to  manufacture  into  hats  and 
other  articles ;  and  so  wide  apart  do  the  stalks  grow,  that 
at  the  proper  season  children  find  employment  in  plucking 
them  stalk  by  stalk,  and  laying  them  down  perfectly  straight, 
that  those  who  are  to  work  them  into  fabrics  may  have 
them  at  their  greatest  length.  In  my  own  dear  Pennsyl 
vania,  it  will  be  late  in  August  before  the  wheat  is  ripe, 
but  yours  in  favored  parts  of  the  State  is  now  ready  for 
the  sickle. 

But  ample  and  diversified  as  are  the  agricultural  re 
sources  of  Alabama,  she  has  deemed  it  wise  to  devote  her 
self  to  one  single  crop,  (cotton,)  and  depend  on  other  States 
for  corn,  hay,  and  other  products  of  the  soil.  This  was 
the  great  error  of  her  people;  for  that  State  is  richest, 
most  prosperous,  and  independent  that  can  supply  all  its 
wants  within  its  own  borders,  and  by  the  diversity  of  its 
productions  provide  remunerative  employment  for  all  its 
people.  You  should  do  this  in  Alabama.  Every  vegeta 
ble  grown  in  the  North  can  be  successfully  produced  upon 
some  of  the  beautiful  hillsides  of  your  extensive  State. 
Do  you  doubt  this,  and  say,  as  one  of  your  citizens  said  to 


THE    SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES   AND    WANTS.  161 

me,  that  you  cannot  raise  root  plants  because  of  their  ten 
dency  to  run  to  woody  fibre?  I  tell  you  that  this  is  be 
cause  your  culture  is  artless,  and  because  you  continuously 
raise  crops  that  exhaust  the  soil  and  make  no  return  to  it 
in  manures  containing  the  elements  you  abstract. 

Invoke  the  aid  of  experience  and  science,  and  give  to 
your  land  sufficient  and  appropriate  food  before  you  deny 
to  a  State  so  broad  and  varied  in  its  topography  and  cli 
mate  any  measure  of  productive  power.  But  to  return  to 
the  contrast  between  your  State  and  New  England.  She 
has  no  copper,  lead,  or  gold,  while  nature  has  given  them 
all  to  Alabama  with  lavish  hand.  I  have  been  surprised 
in  the  last  hour  by  discovering,  through  the  kindness  of 
your  Governor,  your  capacity  to  supply  the  country  with 
sulphur.  Many  of  you  probably  do  "not  know,  indeed,  I 
apprehend  that  few  of  the  best  informed  of  you  know,  how 
primary  an  element  of  our  life  this  is.  A  philosophic 
statesman  has  said  that  the  best  test  of  the  advance  of  a 
people  in  civilization  was  to  be  found  in  the  quantity  of 
crude  brimstone  consumed  per  capita  by  its  people.  It 
enters  into  our  chemicals,  our  cloths  of  all  descriptions, 
and  almost  every  department  of  science  and  the  mechanic 
arts;  and  if  you  but  develop  your  resources  in  that 
behalf,  you  will  bring  within  your  limits  millions  of 
dollars  which  we  now  send  abroad  every  year  for  its  pur 
chase. 

But  who  knows  what  the  resources  of  Alabama  are? 
They  have  not  been  tested  by  experience  or  explored  by 
science.  When  interrogated  as  to  them  by  strangers,  you 
tell  them  that  you  have  the  everglades  or  piney  woods, 
the  broad,  rich  cotton  belt,  the  wheat  growing  region  to 
the  north  of  us,  and  north  of  it  again,  but  still  within  your 
limits,  pasture  and  cattle  lands  in  the  hill  country.  Inade 
quate  as  this  statement  of  your  resources  is,  when  you  shall 
be  able  to  proclaim  it  in  connection  with  the  fact  that  you 
have  established  a  generous  system  of  free  schools,  and 
secured  by  law  fair  wages  for  labor,  millions  of  toiling 
men  will  come  to  dwell  among  you  and  alleviate  the  bur 
dens  that  now  oppress  you. 

But  how  do  you  use  these  advantages?  You  have 
failed  to  avail  yourselves  of  them,  or  to  permit  others  to  do 
so.  Believe  me,  citizens  of  Alabama,  when  I  say  that  I 
have  not  come  to  triumph  in  your  depression,  and  do  not 
wish  to  wound  your  sensibilities ;  but  have  come  as  a 
11 


162  THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS. 

brother  to  reason  with  his  brethren  upon  subjects  in  which 
they  have  an  equal  interest.  The  whole  country  is  ours. 
It  is  yours  and  mine,  and  will  belong  to  our  posterity. 
Gro  with  me  to  my  cold  and  distant  home,  and  you  will 
not  only  find  the  stars  that  render  that  flag  above  you  so 
resplendent  as  the  symbol  of  your  country's  power,  but 
gazing  above  the  flag,  in  the  darkness  of  the  night,  you 
will  discover  that  the  stars  with  which  you  are  familiar 
here  will  look  down  upon  you  there  and  tell  you  that  you 
are  still  at  home. 

It  is,  therefore,  in  the  interest  of  our  country  that  I 
speak,  when  I  ask  you  how  you  use  the  advantages  with 
which  nature  has  so  bounteoulsy  provided  you?  and  tell 
you  that  you  have  impoverished  yourselves  by  treating 
them  with  contempt. 

We  turn  our  coal  and  iron  to  most  profitable  account. 
You  permit  yours  to  slumber  in  their  native  earth. 
Availing  ourselves  of  their  power,  one  man  with  us  does 
the  work  of  a  hundred  with  you.  One  little  girl,  tending 
a  machine  in  a  factory,  will  spin  or  weave  more  cotton  in 
a  day  than  one  of  your  women  will  in  a  year  by  the 
ancient  method  of  the  wheel  and  the  hand-loom  still  in  use 
among  you.  You  have  not  deemed  your  mineral  wealth 
worthy  of  consideration.  In  your  devotion  to  your 
peculiar  system  of  labor  you  have  forgotten  that  iron  and 
coal  are  the  most  potent  agents  of  modern  civilization. 
Mere  muscular  power  has  become  a  thing  of  secondary 
consideration.  Iron  is  the  muscles  of  modern  civilization, 
and  coal,  ignited  coal — fire — is  the  nervous  force  that 
animates  it. 

What  is  it  that  drags  the  long  train  of  heavily -freighted 
cars,  hour  after  hour,  and  day  after  day,  at  a  speed  greater 
than  that  of  the  fleetest  horse  ?  Is  it  not  iron  fashioned 
into  a  locomotive?  It  was  these  rejected  elements  of  your 
greatness  that  expanded  my  native  city,  a  mere  village  in 
my  childhood,  into  a  city  of  700,000  prosperous  inhabitants. 
In  some  of  our  workshops  from  1500  to  2000  hands  find 
employment,  none  of  whom  do  heavy,  muscular  labor. 
We  throw  that  species  of  labor  on  iron  and  coal.  A  little 
girl  or  woman  watches  a  machine  simply  to  see  that  no 
loose  thread  mars  the  smoothness  of  the  fabric,  and  so 
earns  good  wages.  Thus  we  provide  for  the  widows  and 
orphan  daughters  of  our  soldiers.  In  the  heavier  work 
shops  massive  blooms  are  converted  into  finest  plate  or 


THE    SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES   AND   WANTS.  163 

bar  iron  by  the  trip-hammer  or  rolling-mill,  which  steam 
operates,  and  men  or  boys  do  but  guide.  Few  of  you  have 
ever  seen  a  trip-hammer  at  work.  In  its  full  force  it  will 
flatten  at  a  single  blow  a  rounded  mass  of  heated  iron ;  but 
its  power  may  be  so  controlled  that  it  will  crack  and  yet 
not  break  an  egg. 

We  strive  to  develop  and  convert  to  immediate  profit 
our  coal  and  iron  beds  by  connecting  our  city  and  great 
thoroughfare  railroads  with  roads  from  every  pit's  mouth, 
and  have  thus  tempted  from  England,  Scotland,  Wales, 
and  the  iron  districts  of  Belgium  and  Germany,  the  most 
skilful  of  their  miners  and  workmen  in  metals. 

Will  you  notice  how  this  has  enriched  others  than  the 
parties  directly  concerned  ?  Lands  within  the  corporate 
limits  of  Philadelphia,  which  twenty  years  ago  were  under 
the  plow  are  now  selling  as  town  lots,  at  from  seven  thou 
sand  to  twenty  thousand  dollars  per  acre,  and  others  at 
from  sixty  thousand  to  a  hundred  thousand  dollars  per  acre, 
and  are  covered  by  palatial  residences  or  stores,  crowded 
with  stocks  of  goods  gathered  from  every  quarter  of  the 
globe. 

While  we  thus  add  to  our  wealth  we  cheapen  the  con 
veniences  and  comforts  of  life.  Let  me  illustrate  this  by 
some  facts  drawn  from  other  States.  The  railroads  from 
New  York  to  Philadelphia,  and  from  Memphis  to  Grenada, 
Miss.,  are  both  links  in  great  lines  running  from  North  to 
South.  They  differ  in  length  but  a  few  miles,  being  one 
precisely,  and  the  other  nearly  a  hundred  miles.  Over 
that  between  Philadelphia  and  New  York  eight  trains  pass 
each  way  daily ;  over  the  other  but  one.  From  Memphis 
to  Grenada  the  time  is  six  hours  and  a  half;  between  the 
other  points  it  is  less  than  four  hours.  From  Philadelphia 
to  New  York  the  fare  is  three  dollars,  and  we  complain  of 
it  as  extortionate ;  but  on  the  other  road  it  is  eight  dollars. 
The  traveller  in  either  of  the  Nothern  cities,  anxious  to 
reach  the  other,  need  not  wait  over  three  hours  at  any 
time.  At  Memphis  or  Grenada  he  may  be  compelled  to 
wait  nearly  twenty-four  hours.  In  view  of  these  facts  may 
I  not  ask  whether  I  do  wrong  in  suggesting  that  there  is 
something  in  our  experience  worthy  of  your  study  and 
adoption?* 


*  The  Philadelphia  citizen  of  1870  travels  five  miles  for  6J  cents  over  the 
safest  and  smoothest  roads  of  our  surprising  modern  civilization.  Of  these  mag 
nificent  city  thoroughfares  there  are  one  hundred  and  seventy-five  miles  in 


164;  THE   SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES   AND   WANTS. 

In  Philadelphia,  almost  every  temperate  and  industrious 
laboring  man  is  the  owner  of  the  house  in  which  his  family 
dwells.  He  may  still  owe  part  of  the  purchase  money, 
and  if  so,  he  has  an  additional  incentive  to  industry  and 
economy.  Young  people  who  do  not  own,  rent,  each  family 
a  separate  tenement,  and  he  is  regarded  as  a  bad  citizen 
who  builds  a  working  man's  home  and  does  not  provide 
it  with  a  bathroom,  into  which  hot  and  cold  water  are 
introduced.  This  is  deemed  essential  to  cleanliness  and 
health.  In  view  of  the  assemblage  by  which  I  am  sur 
rounded,  can  I  give  offence  by  remarking  that  there  is  a 
vast  difference  between  the  comforts  enjoyed  by  your 
laboring  people  and  ours? 

My  native  State — indeed,  I  may  say,  the  whole  North, 
from  Maine  to  Kansas — is  divided  into  districts,  not  con 
gressional,  not  senatorial,  not  legislative,  not  judicial,  but 
school  districts;  and  every  man  throughout  each  State  is 
taxed  in  proportion  to  his  wealth,  to  build  schools,  furnish 
books,  and  pay  teachers,  so  that  every  child,  however 
poor,  that  is  brought  into  the  State,  may  receive  a  good 
elementary  education  ;  and  we  expect  the  bright  apprentice 
boy  of  to-day  to  become  the  master  of  an  establishment 
larger  and  more  perfect  than  that  in  which  he  acquires  his 
trade.  We  hold  all  places  of  honor  or  profit  open  to  all  our 
people,  and  thus  stimulate  every  boy  and  man  to  give  the 
State  the  best  results  of  his  industry,  enterprise,  or  genius. 
Thus  we  draw  from,  or  rather  create  upon  even  the  sterile 
soil  of  New  England,  products  that  bring  us  in  return  the 
best  results  of  the  industry  of  all  other  people ;  and  more 
cloth,  more  writing,  printing,  and  wall  paper,  and  greater 
varieties  of  well-prepared  food,  are  consumed  by  our  peo 
ple  per  capita,  than  by  those  of  any  other  section  of  our 
own  or  any  other  country  in  the  world. 

How  are  we  to  account  for  this  difference?  I  behold 
around  me  a  laboring  population,  not  only  poor  but  desti- 

Philadelphia  alone,  over  which  last  year  nearly  sixty-five  millions  of  passengers 
were  transported. 

The  cost  of  these  city  railroads  was  six  millions  of  dollars ;  their  annual  re 
ceipts  are  three  millions  eight  hundred  thousand ;  they  run  daily  thirty  thou 
sand  miles  over  our  streets  ;  they  employ  four  thousand  horses,  which  consume  eleven 
thousand  tons  of  hay  and  twenty  million  pound*  of  grain.  There  are  now  three 
hundred  and  fifty  miles  of  paved  streets  in  Philadelphia. — Address  of  Col.  J.  W. 
Forney,  July  4th,  1871. 

The  working  people  are  the  chief  patrons  of  these  roads,  and  thus  furnish  our 
farmers  with  markets  for  horses,  hay  :md  oats,  which  they  would  not  enjoy  if 
under  free  trade  our  wares  were  mado  in  foreign  countries. 


THE   SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES   AND   WAXTS.  165 

tute ;  almost  homeless,  and  untutored  in  all  but  the  simplest 
arts  of  life.  Tempting  as  are  your  boundless  resources 
and  genial  climate,  no  emigrants  come  to  settle  in  your 
midst.  You  have  built  no  great  city,  New  Orleans  being 
the  largest  city  of  the  South.  Your  cities  would  be  only 
first  class  towns  or  villages  in  the  North.  You  have  no 
New  York,  Philadelphia,  Brooklyn,  Boston,  Baltimore, 
Cincinnati,  St.  Louis  or  Chicago.  Yet,  north  of  the  Poto 
mac  and  Ohio  are  no  such  boundless  and  diversified  stores 
of  wealth  as  you  possess.  You  have  the  choice  cotton 
fields  of  the  world ;  the  rice,  cane-sugar,  hemp  and  tobacco 
fields  of  the  United  States  are  yours;  and  on  some  of  your 
hillsides,  or  in  your  smiling  valleys  you  may  grow  every 
plant  or  find  every  mineral  that  is  native  to  the  country 
east  of  the  Rocky  Mountains.  How,  my  fellow-citizens, 
shall  we  account  for  the  poverty  and  depression  of  the 
South,  and  the  general  and  growing  prosperity  of  the 
North?  We  can  only  do  it  by  turning  from  nature  to 
society.  Our  prosperity  is  the  result  of  our  development 
of  man,  by  giving  him  a  fair  field  for  the  exercise  of  all  his 
energy  and  talents;  and  you  lag  behind  because  your 
system  repressed  man's  energies,  restrained  his  enterprise, 
and  contracted  the  field  of  his  usefulness.  This  must  be 
the  cause,  for  in  all  other  respects  our  policy  has  been  the 
same.  The  same  flag  represented  our  country's  power 
and  beneficence.  In  all  other  respects  our  institutions 
were  the  same.  The  same  legislative,  executive  and  judi 
cial  organization,  the  same  division  of  the  State  into  coun 
ties,  townships,  cities  and  boroughs.  The  one  difference 
was  that  we  knew  at  the  North  what  you  failed  to  perceive 
— that  the  boy  who  could  read  and  write  was  worth  more 
than  one  of  equal  strength  and  age  who  could  not ;  and 
that  the  boy  who  saw  before  him  the  chance  for  wealth  or 
distinction  would  strive  to  attain  one  or  the  other,  and  by 
study,  industry  and  economy,  endeavor  to  gather  capital 
with  which  to  labor  for  himself  rather  than  for  another. 
Having  provided  for  the  education  of  all  their  children, 
the  people  of  the  Northern  States  made  ample  provision  to 
secure  a  fair  day's  wages  for  every  fair  day's  work  that 
might  be  done  by  man  or  woman. 

But  you  may  say  this  would  affect  only  the  people  in 
cities.  This  is  your  mistake,  and  has  been  to  you  a  fatal 
delusion.  The  landholder  whose  estate  has  been  absorbed 
by  a  growing  town  or  city  has  often  received  more  for  ;» 


166  THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS. 

little  building  lot  than  his  whole  estate  had  cost  him ;  and 
he  who  had  invested  the  earnings  of  years  in  a  poor  home 
in  the  suburbs  has  been  enriched  by  the  city  growing  be 
yond  him,  and  its  increasing  commerce  or  manufactures 
giving  value  to  his  lot.  Thus,  too,  are  our  farmers  en 
riched.  I  know  not  what  land  is  worth  in  a  circle  of  ten 
miles  around  your  beautiful  city.  I  doubt  whether  forty 
or  fifty  dollars  would  be  too  low  an  estimate,  but  you 
would  not  buy  land  in  the  North  as  near  as  large  a  city, 
with  such  wonderful  capabilities,  for  less  than  hundreds  of 
dollars.  So  it  would  be  here,  would  you  connect  your 
city  with  the  neighboring  coal  and  iron  districts,  and  build 
furnaces,  forges,  rolling  mills,  machine  shops,  and  facto 
ries,  and  availing  yourselves  of  the  magnificent  water 
power  at  Wetumka,  spin  and  weave  your  own  cotton,  and 
create  an  Alabama  Lowell  or  Manchester.  You  would 
then  learn  what  your  rich  lands  are  capable  of. 

Nobody  can  estimate  the  agricultural  value  of  the  stimu 
lants  created  by  great  towns  and  the  refuse  of  factories. 
You  have  grown  cotton  until  you  have  extracted  the  very 
life  from  the  lighter  soils  of  your  States.  As  I  passed 
through  Mississippi  I  saw  wide  stretches  of  land  so  ex 
hausted  by  cotton  that  they  would  not  produce  fibrous 
roots  enough  to  prevent  the  soil  from  washing  away.  Soil 
was  gone,  and  the  wash  had  left  little  mounds,  that,  in  the 
light  of  the  setting  sun,  looked  like  red  tongues  of  fire 
rising  from  the  earth  to  avenge  its  wrongs. 

Throughout  the  North  crops  are  alternated,  and  in  the 
neighborhood  of  cities,  or  even  of  new  manufacturing 
towns,  fields  that  had  been  exhausted  by  injudicious  cul 
ture  until  they  yielded  but  ten  or  twelve  bushels  of  wheat 
to  the  acre,  have  been  reinvigorated,  and  now  yield  thirty 
bushels,  as  they  did  in  their  primitive  condition.  Make 
Montgomery  a  great  city,  and  you  will  add  to  the  wealth 
of  every  man  within  a  circuit  of  a  hundred  miles.  Let 
it  be  your  ambition  to  raise  a  fair  amount  of  cotton,  but 
let  it  also  be  your  desire  to  supply  the  States  bounding  the 
gulf  with  corn,  and  to  send  it  and  your  cotton  hence  be 
hind  locomotives  and  over  rails  of  your  own  construction. 

Do  not  tell  me  that  you  have  not  laborers  intelligent 
enough  to  assist  you  in  this  great  work.  I  saw  yesterday 
in  your  freedmen's  schools  abundant  evidence  of  the  in 
correctness  of  this  statement.  I  am  very  familiar  with  the 
public  schools  of  the  North,  but  I  was  profoundly  aston- 


THE    SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AXD   WAXTS.  167 

ished  by  what  I  saw  among  the  younger  pupils  of  the 
freedmen's  schools  of  this  city,  and  say  without  reserva 
tion  that  I  never  saw  in  any  school  pupils  of  equal  age 
whose  attainments  and  general  intelligence  exceeded  those 
of  two,  a  boy  and  girl,  one  six  and  the  other  seven  years 
old,  who  I  examined  yesterday.  I  doubted  the  fairness  of 
the  exhibition,  and  believed  that  they  had  been  specially 
prepared  for  it,  but  taking  the  examination  into  my  own 
hands,  and  testing  them  in  spelling,  reading,  geography, 
and  other  branches,  was  not  only  convinced  of  the  honesty 
of  the  public  exhibition,  but  amazed  at  the  proficiency  of 
the  children.  Tell  me  not  that  the  race  from  which  they 
spring  is  wanting  in  intellect  or  adaptation,  or  that  their 
little  hands  will  not  one  day  be  competent  to  the  most 
delicate  or  ingenious  labor.  Yes,  gentlemen,  you  have 
competent  laborers  at  hand  for  the  wide  diversification  of 
your  pursuits.  To  demonstrate  this,  you  have  but  to  give 
poor  people,  regardless  of  color,  a  fair  field  and  generous 
inducements.  I  reiterate  that  I  am  endeavoring  to  wound 
none  of  your  susceptibilities  in  speaking  thus  pointedly 
to  you.  I  am  simply  laboring  to  induce  you  to  enter  into 
generous  competition  with  us  at  the  North.  If  you  will, 
you  may  be  blessed  beyond  us  as  much  as  we  are  beyond 
any  other  people. 

I  speak  the  more  freely  because  I- once  shared  your  pre 
judices,  but  I  long  since  came  to  know  that  we  can  only 
be  happy  as  we  accord  to  every  other  man,  however  hum 
ble  he  may  be,  every  right  that  we  demand  from  others 
for  ourselves ;  and  I  seek  in  vain  for  any  other  cause  for 
the  disparity  between  the  two  sections  than  our  respect  for 
man's  rights,  and  your  contempt  for  man  as  man.  Let  me 
then  implore  you  to  enter  earnestly  upon  the  work  of  re 
constructing  your  State  upon  the  plan  provided  by  Con 
gress.  Let  not  freedom  and  equality  be  forced  upon  you 
by  others.  Accept  the  inevitable  and  find  in  it  a  good 
providence. 

Some  of  you  may  ask,  as  others  have  done,  whether  the 
military  bill  is  a  finality.  That,  the  controlling  minds  of 
the  South  must  determine.  It  was  so  meant  by  Congress, 
if  it  was  fairly  accepted  by  the  South.  No  further  con 
gressional  legislation  touching  the  South  will  be  had,  un 
less  by  a  spirit  of  resistance  on  the  part  of  the  Southern 
people  its  necessity  is  made  manifest.* 

*Andrew  Johnson's  determination  to  nullity  the  reconstruction  acts  hud  not 
then  been  disclosed. 


168  THE   SOUTH— ITS    RESOURCES   AND   WANTS. 

I  am  gratified  in  being  able  to  report  that  I  have  found 
generally  throughout  the  South  a  generous  spirit,  a  readi 
ness  to  acknowledge  the  right  of  all  to  travel  freely,  and 
to  discuss  with  frankness  and  candor  the  issues  of  the  day; 
and  though  in  some  quarters  a  different  spirit  prevails,  I 
believe  that  in  five  years  the  South  will  be  more  liberal 
than  the  North  has  been. 

Now  a  word  to  you,  my  colored  fellow-citizens  :  you  are 
free,  and  it  is  your  duty,  every  one  of  you  who  can  find 
employment,  to  labor,  and  to  practice  temperance  and  econ 
omy.  If  there  be  among  you  one  able-bodied  man  who 
can  find  employment  at  wages,  who  wastes  his  time  in 
idleness,  he  is  committing  a  crime  against  himself  and 
his  race.  Freedom  means  the  assured  right  of  a  man  to 
earn  his  livelihood,  and  to  manage  his  affairs  as  he  may 
deem  best.  I  cannot  better  illustrate  what  liberty  is  than 
by  a  little  incident  that  happened  one  day  while  I  was 
walking  with  a  friend,  his  arm  resting  in  mine.  He  sud 
denly  withdrew  it,  and  I  turned  to  discover  why  he 
had  done  so.  There  lay  upon  its  back  upon  the  ground 
a  broad,  green-backed  insect,  which  the  boys  in  our  sec 
tion  call  the  gold  bug,  kicking  upward  for  the  ground. 
Working  the  end  of  his  walking-cane  under  it,  he  gave  it 
a  toss,  and  it  lit  on  its  feet.  "Now  go,  poor  devil,"  said 
he ;  "hoe  your  own  row;  you  have  just  as  good  a  chance 
as  any  other  bug  of  your  kind." 

Liberty  is  to  each  of  you  the  assurance  that  the  Gov 
ernment  will  secure  to  every  one  of  you  the  right  to  hoe 
his  own  row  with  as  good  a  chance  as  any  other  bug  of 
his  kind.  Do  you  ask  me  what  is  your  kind?  It  is  MAN 
KIND.  I  hold  that  there  is  but  one  race  of  men,  and  if 
there  be  two,  then  one  of  two  things  is  certain  :  'that  this 
Southern  sun  plays  the  deuce  with  the  African's  complex 
ion,  or  there  are  large  numbers  of  ex-slaves  in  the  freed- 
men's  schools  that  are  not  there  by  virtue  of  African  descent. 

Freedom  establishes  the  fact  that  a  good  man  is  better 
than  a  bad  one ;  that  a  wise  man  is  better  than  a  fool ; 
that  a  learned  man  is  better  than  one  who  is  content  to 
pass  his  life  in  ignorance  ;  that  an  active  man  will  win  the 
race  and  take  the  prize  from  an  indolent  one.  If  you 
have  a  dollar,  freedom  will  secure  it  to  you ;  and  if  you 
acquire  land,  freedom  will  protect  you  in  its  enjoyment 
and  possession.  You  have  not  always  had  the  right  to 
protect  your  wife,  but  freedom  not  only  gives  that  right, 


THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS.  169 

but  makes  it  your  duty  to  do  it,  to  deal  tenderly  with  her 
in  all  things,  and  to  put  over  her  head  the  roof  of  your 
own  home.  Freedom  requires  you  to  see  to  it  that  your 
children  occupy  seats  in  the  public  schools,  so  that  their 
chances  in  life  may  be  better  than  yours,  and  by  any 
amount  of  toil  you  can  endure,  to  contribute  in  taxes  your 
share  of  the  common  charge. 

Some  of  you  may  desire  to  travel  and  to  emigrate,  but 
the  great  mass  of  you  are  to  pass  your  lives  here  in  Ala 
bama,  and  freedom  requires  you  to  live  in  peace  with  vour 
neighbors,  for  you  now  have  common  interests.  By  indus 
try,  sobriety,  the  improvement  of  your  minds,  and  care 
and  culture  of  your  children,  you  will  command  the  con 
fidence  and  esteem  of  those  among  whom  you  dwell.  God 
made  you  free.  You  did  not  win  your  freedom,  nor  did 
we  give  it  to  you.  God  guided  the  course  of  battles,  and 
controlled  events  so  that  when  the  war  closed  every  man 
of  you  was  as  free  as  his  white  brother.  You  are  now 
involved  in  the  duties  of  citizenship,  and  must  look  to  it 
well  that  you  so  perform  your  duties  as  to  maintain  that 
freedom  for  yourselves  and  all  other  men  within  the  broad 
limits  of  your  country. 

Many  of  you,  I  am  told,  are  skillful  mechanics,  carpen 
ters,  bricklayers,  house- wrights,  shoemakers,  tailors,  or  are 
skilled  in  other  mechanical  branches.  See  to  it,  those  of 
you  who  are  capable  of  engaging  in  business  for  your 
selves,  that  you  do  not  spend  your  lives  in  laboring  for 
wages.  You  cannot  all  be  employers  and  master  work 
men,  but  some  of  you  can,  and  the  number  of  such  will 
increase  if  you  are  industrious  and  thrifty.  Most  of  you 
have  been  bred  to  plantation  or  farm  work.  Let  the  aim 
of  such  be  to  acquire  land,  put  up  a  dwelling  and  procure 
adequate  stock  to  work  your  acres.  The  homestead  law- 
offers  lots  of  eighty  acres  to  each  and  every  one  of  you, 
but  I  am  told  that  the  land  offices  are  so  few  and  distant, 
and  the  expense  of  travel  and  clearing  the  land  is  so  great, 
that  you  cannot  avail  yourselves  of  its  privileges  ;  but 
Congress  will  remedy  this  at  its  next  session,  for  it  is  its 
purpose  to  secure  if  possible  a  homestead  for  every  family 
that  desires  to  till  the  soil.  Thus  every  one  of  you  may 
aim  at  a  manly  and  honorable  independence  in  life,  arid  a 
vigorous  struggle  in  the  pursuit  of  such  aim  will  not  fail 
to  secure  you  the  sympathy  of  all  good  men. 

Addressing  the  white  citizens,  Mr.  Kelley  continued : 


170  THE    SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS. 

I  do  not  come  to  the  South  as  the  agent  of  any  faction 
or  party,  but,  in  conclusion,  I  must  say  something  of  the 
principles  of  the  Eepublican  party,  because  I  believe  that 
the  welfare  of  our  country  is  bound  up  with  the  success  of 
that  party  for  some  years  to  come.  The  North,  in  which 
that  party  prevails,  is  intensely  national.  The  South,  in 
which  it  had  no  recognized  existence  or  adherents,  was  on 
the  other  hand  intensely  sectional ;  its  people,  priding 
themselves  on  the  sovereignty  of  the  States,  and  looking 
to  them  rather  than  to  the  General  Government  for  the 
maintenance  of  their  rights.  The  Republican  party  is  in 
spired  by  two  grand  sentiments  ;  the  first,  national  unity, 
and  the  second,  individual  liberty.  It  believes,  as  did 
Thomas  Jefferson,  that  every  man  is  endowed  by  nature 
with  the  right  to  life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness. 
It  holds  with  him  that  all  men  are  born  equal ;  not  equal 
in  stature,  or  color,  or  intelligence,  but  with  equal  rights 
before  the  laws  of  State  and  country,  as  they  are  equal 
before  the  judgment-seat  of  Him  who  is  the  common  father. 
It  is  not,  as  has  often  been  alleged,  the  purpose  of  that 
party  to  overthrow  the  constitution  or  invade  the  rights 
of  States,  but  to  promote  the  welfare  of  all,  and  to  cement 
the  Union  by  watching  over  the  general  and  external  in 
terests  of  every  State. 

Let  me  illustrate  this.  Under  the  State  rights  doctrine 
there  could  be  no  general  levee  system  for  the  Mississippi 
river,  and  the  result  is  that  the  rich  low  lands  bordering 
that  river  and  its  tributaries,  from  Tennessee  to  the  Gulf, 
are  overflowed,  and  their  owners  and  laborers  driven  from 
their  occupancy.  Under  the  State  rights  system,  Tennes 
see,  Mississippi,  Louisiana  and  Arkansas  each  had  separate 
levee  regulations ;  and  some  of  these  States  again  remitted 
the  duty  of  keeping  the  levees  in  order  to  the  counties  in 
which  they  lay.  Thus  it  happened  that  negligence  on  the 
part  of  a  country  or  State  north  of  others  which  constructed 
proper  levees,  often  causes  the  ruin  of  those  whose  levees 
would  have  protected  them  from  danger.  The  Republicans 
regard  the  Mississippi  river  as  a  great  national  highway, 
that  should  be  under  the  charge  of  the  General  Govern 
ment,  and  desire  that  its  banks  shall  be  guarded  by  a 
general  system  of  levees,  of  which  the  National  Govern 
ment  shall  have  the  care  and  responsibility. 

In  illustration  of  the  Republican  party's  love  of  liberty, 
I  point  to  the  homestead  law,  by  which  it  would  convert 


THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS.  171 

the  largest  possible  number  of  the  people  of  the  country 
into  independent  landholders.  Thus  it  is  pledged  to  main 
tain  the  equality  of  every  man  before  the  laws ;  to  secure 
the  largest  liberty  to  individuals  consistent  with  the  public 
welfare,  and  to  preserve  an  indivisible  Union  from  the 
Gulf  to  the  northern  boundary,  and  from  ocean  to  ocean. 

Had  the  statesmen  of  the  South,  when  slavery  was  over 
thrown  and  the  armies  of  the  Confederacy  surrendered, 
accepted  the  situation  cordially,  and  legislated  for  man  as 
man,  Congress  would  not  probably  have  interfered  with 
their  local  legislation.  But  when  State  after  State  enacted 
Vagrant  Laws  and  Apprentice  Laws,  by  which  slavery 
was  to  be  perpetuated  under  a  new  guise,  and,  failing  to 
provide  for  the  education  of  the  people,  they  denounced 
as  "school  marms"  and  "nigger  teachers"  and  persecuted 
the  noble  women  who,  sacrificing  everything  else  but 
Christian  duty,  hastened  here  to  prepare  the  ignorant 
freedmen  for  the  proper  enjoyment  of  the  new  condition 
upon  which  they  were  entering,  Congress  found  a  high 
duty  devolved  upon  it,  and  did  not  shrink  from  its  per 
formance.  Believing  that  a  Democratic  Eepublic  can 
exist  securely  only  so  long  as  the  equal  rights  of  all  are 
guarded  and  maintained,  it  exhibited  its  willingness  to 
exercise  its  amplest  powers  in  this  behalf. 

The  people  of  the  North  want  peace  and  amity  to  per 
vade  the  whole  land,  but  they  feel  that  these  blessings, 
with  general  prosperity,  can  only  be  assured  when  all  shall 
acknowledge  that  the  protection  of  the  liberty  of  the 
citizens  is  the  highest  duty  of  the  Government. 

Citizens  of  Montgomery,  I  thank  you  for  the  courtesy 
and  attention  with  which  you  have  listened  to  me.  You 
have  heard  the  remarks  I  intended  to  make  to  the  citizens 
of  Mobile ;  and  though  some  of  you  may  deem  them  in 
sulting  and  incendiary,  you  will  hardly  say,  as  the  people 
of  that  city  did,  that  I  ought  to  be  shot  for  attempting  to 
utter  them. 


ADDRESS  AT  PHILADELPHIA,  PENNA. 

DELIVERED  JUNE  I?TH,  1867,  EEPORTED  FOR  THE 
INQUIRER. 

My  Friends,  Neighbors,  and  Corstituents :  I  am  profound 
ly  grateful   for   this   demonstration   of  your   affectionate 


172  THE    SOUTH — .ITS   RESOURCES   AXD   WANTS. 

interest.  I  never  knew  how  sacred  that  word  home,  so 
felicitously  uttered  by  Mr.  Pierson,  was,  until  during  my 
recent  absence  from  you.  When  cowering  before  more 
than  a  hundred  bullets,  or  while  my  body  was  shielded 
from  them  by  those  of  two  negroes,  who  perilled  their 
lives  to  save  mine,  I  realized  how  dear  were  home,  kindred, 
and  friends.  I  left  you  at  the  invitation  of  the  Governor 
>f  Louisiana  and  the  Mayor  of  New  Orleans  to  visit  that 
distant  State  and  city,  hoping  that  I  might  serve  our  dis 
tracted  country,  and  eager  to  view  that  nearly  one-half  of 
our  country,  from  which,  by  reason  of  my  love  of  personal 
liberty,  I  had  so  long  been  excluded.  I  did  not  dream  of 
danger.  Others  spoke  of  it,  but  I  scoffed  at  the  idea. 
I  went,  bearing  no  hatred  to  any  man ;  but  believing  that 
the  truths  which  for  the  last  eleven  years  I  have  been  in 
the  habit  of  proclaiming  to  you  would  be  specially  useful 
to  the  people  of  that  section,  I  gladly  availed  myself  of  the 
opportunity  of  uttering  them  kindly  and  courteously  in 
their  midst ;  and,  my  friends,  throughout  my  extended 
excursion  I  was  received  with  all  the  kindness  and  courtesy 
the  people  were  able  to  bestow  upon  me,  save  in  one  city. 
I  therefore  beg  you  not  to  charge  the  murderous  spirit 
of  the  Mobile  mob  to  the  Southern  people  at  large. 
[Applause.]  That  outrage  was  due  more  largely  to 
Andrew  Johnson,  the  reactionary  President  of  the  United 
States,  than  even  to  the  municipal  authorities  of  Mobile  or 
the  mob  they  should  have  held  in  subjection.  The  chief 
promoter  of  that  murderous  riot  was  a  recreant  Northerner, 
who  had  been  sent  to  that  city  by  the  Pesident  as  assessor 
of  internal  revenue,  Colonel  Mann,  formerly  of  Michigan, 
who  owns  the  Mobile  Times.  That  paper  had,  in  advance 
of  my  arrival,  excited  the  passions  of  the  Southern  people 
against  me,  and  in  an  article  on  the  day  preceding  my 
arrival,  every  allegation  in  which  Colonel  Mann  admitted, 
in  the  presence  of  two  gentlemen  now  present,  to  be  wholly 
false  and  unfounded,  had  inflamed  the  passions  of  the  Irish 
citizens  of  Mobile  against  me.  But  not  to  detain  you  with 
the  details  of  that  sanguinary  scene,  let  me  say  that  the 
outbreak  was  provoked  by  no  indiscreet  word  of  mine. 
It  had  been  planned  before  1  went  to  the  meeting,  if  not 
before  I  arrived  in  Mobile,  and  the  man  immediately 
behind  me  would  have  been  shot  through  the  head,  as  he 
was,  and  another  not  five  feet  from  me  would  have  been 
murdered,  as  he  was,  at  the  preconcerted  signal  had  I  been 


THE    SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES    AND   WANTS.  173 

reading  the  Litany  or  the  Lord's  Prayer.  I  am  told  it  has 
been  sneeringly  said  that  I  got  under  a  table.  I  have 
never  been  a  soldier  or  sought  reputation  at  the  cannon's 
mouth,  and  very  freely  admit  that,  when  bullets  were 
whizzing  by  and  pattering  against  the  wall  behind  me,  I 
would  have  thanked  Almighty  God  for  a  bullet-proof  table 
under  which  to  creep. 

In  Memphis,  the  people  of  which  I  addressed  before  go 
ing  to  New  Orleans,  the  elegant  opera  house  was  crowded. 
My  audience  represented  every  shade  of  complexion  and 
political  opinion.  In  many  instances,  at  least,  so  well- 
known  citizens  of  Memphis  assured  rne,  the  late  rebel 
soldier,  who  had  met  our  army  on  many  a  field,  and  the 
enfranchised  slave,  sat  side  by  side,  and  when  I  closed  my 
extended  address,  my  name  and  those  of  our  city  and  State 
were  heartily  cheered. 

Had  I  been  in  some  signal  respect  the  nation's  benefac 
tor,  I  could  not  have  been  more  honored  in  New  Orleans 
than  I  was  during  my  four  days'  stay  in  that  gay  and 
beautiful  city.  After  I  had  addressed  ten  thousand  of  her 
people  in  Lafayette  Square,  I  was  generously  entertained 
by  (among  others)  a  former  citizen  of  Philadelphia,  three 
of  whose  sons  had  served  and  one  fallen  in  the  Confederate 
army.  From  many  such  I  received  thanks  for  the  frank 
ness  and  courtesy  of  my  speech. 

Leaving  Mobile  on  a  Government  boat,  which,  I  may 
remark,  was  provided  for  me  not  at  my  request,  but 
because  Gen.  Sheppard,  the  post  commandant,  concurred 
in  the  judgment  of  the  Union  men  of  Mobile,  that  my 
friends  and  I  would  encounter  insult,  if  not  outrage,  on  the 
regular  boat  for  Tensas,  where  we  must  take  the  cars,  I 
proceeded  to  Montgomery.  In  that  city,  the  picturesque 
site  of  which  strikingly  resembles  that  of  Washington,  we 
occupied  rooms  in  the  hotel  from  which  the  order  to  fire 
on  Fort  Sumter  had  gone  forth,  from  the  balcony  of  which 
the  Confederate  Declaration  of  Independence  had  first  been 
read  to  the  public,  and  on  the  balcony  of  which  Stephen 
A.  Douglas  had  been  pelted  with  eggs  in  1860.  Though 
pursued  by  the  malignant  falsehoods  of  the  Mobile  papers, 
I  felt  as  safe  and  spoke  as  frankly  in  Montgomery  as  I  now 
do  at  the  threshold  of  my  home. 

I  addressed  the  citizens  from  the  rear  of  the  Capitol. 
The  meeting  numbered  about  three  thousand  people,  white 
and  colored,  whose  political  opinions  were  quite  as  diverse 


THE    SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES    AXD   WANTS. 

as  their  complexions.  Nothing  disturbed  the  harmony  of 
the  meeting ;  and  at  its  close  I  was  not  only  cheered,  but 
leading  citizens  grouped  about  me  and  pressed  me  to  visit 
other  sections  of  the  State  and  address  the  people.  Con- 
spicuous  among  these  was  Judge  Walker,  chief  justice, 
who  was  also  chief  justice  of  the  Confederate  State  of 
Alabama. 

To  comply  with  this  request  was  impossible,  and  we  started 
next  morning  for  Atlanta,  Ga.,  a  beautiful  and  prosperous 
city,  which,  by  its  sudden  rise  from  its  ashes  exceeds  the 
fabled  Phoenix.  It  is  rapidly  fulfilling  its  destiny,  and  be 
coming  a  great  railroad  and  commercial  centre.  We  ar 
rived  there  toward  the  close  of  a  bright  Sunday  afternoon, 
and  were  received  at  the  depot  by  a  committee  of  promi 
nent  citizens,  and  thousands  of  colored  people,  in  their 
clean  gay  Sunday  attire.  The  next  morning  we  visited 
the  Storr's  school  for  freedmen,  and,  large  as  is  my  famili 
arity  with  the  schools  of  the  North,  I  am  free  to  say  that 
I  have  rarely  seen  a  classified  school  superior  to  this.  In 
the  afternoon  I  addressed  a  meeting  resembling  that  at 
Montgomery  in  numbers,  character,  and  good  order.  The 
same  generous  expressions  followed  my  remarks,  and 
among  the  pleasant  things  said  by  the  many  who  gathered 
around  me  was  an  offer  by  the  Quartermaster  General  of 
the  Confederate  State  of  Georgia  to  pay  my  expenses  if  I 
would  remain  in  the  State  and  address  the  people  of  every 
county. 

My  engagements  in  North  Carolina  required  my  early 
departure,  and  we  left  the  next  morning.  On  arriving  at 
Augusta,  Ga.,  we  were  met  by  Mayor  Blodgett,  and  at  the 
Planters'  House,  to  which  he  conducted  us,  were  waited 
upon  by  large  numbers  of  citizens.  I  shall  always  regret 
that  my  engagements  precluded  the  possibility  of  my  corn- 
plying  with  their  urgent  request  to  remain  and  address  the 
citizens.  Had  I  been  able  to  do  so,  it  would  have  deprived 
the  Conservative  papers  of  the  stupid  story  they  are  circu 
lating  that  General  Pope  had  admonished  me  to  speak  no 
more  in  Georgia. 

In  North  Carolina  I  spoke  at  Charlotte,  Concord,  Salis 
bury,  and  Greensboro,  and  my  reception  in  each  case  was 
as  cordial  as  at  Memphis  or  New  Orleans,  but  less  demon 
strative,  because  the  cities  were  smaller.  I  came  thence  to 
Danville,  Virginia,  where  I  made  my  closing  address  to  a 
very  large  assemblage  of  citizens.  Thus,  you  will  see,  my 


THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WASTS.  175 

friends,  that  I  crossed  Kentucky,  Tennessee,  Mississippi, 
Louisiana,  and  leaving  the  last-named  State  by  Lake  Pont- 
chartrain  and  the  Gulf,  for  Alabama,  came  thence  through 
Georgia,  South  Carolina,  North  Carolina,  and  Virginia, 
on  the  homeward  trip,  and  must  have  seen  something  of 
the  South. 

I  now  know  from  observation  and  intercourse  some 
thing  of  its  people,  and  I  but  say  to  you  what  I  said  to 
each  of  my  audiences,  large  or  small,  in  school-room,  or 
from  public  platform,  that  the  whole  people  will  soon  re 
gard  the  terrible  war  through  which  we  have  just  passed 
as  the  throes  and  agony  of  the  birth  of  a  new,  holier,  and 
more  blessed  nation  than  the  world  has  yet  known.  [Great 
applause.] 

I  saw  during  my  trip  a  country  upon  which  the  Almighty 
has  with  most  lavish  hand  bestowed  His  richest  material 
gifts.  It  is  gorged  with  every  mineral.  I  have  scarcely 
been  in  a  State  that  does  not  abound  in  coal,  iron,  copper, 
and  lead,  and  have  travelled  over  a  region  of  country 
richly  underlaid  with  gold-bearing  quartz.  Let  me  speak 
specially  of  North  Carolina,  because,  as  is  equally  true 
of  Virginia,  poverty  has  driven  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
her  native  citizens  into  exile.  My  friends,  North  Carolina 
is  the  most  beautiful  and  richest  portion  of  God's  earth 
upon  which  my  vision  or  feet  have  evef*  rested.  You 
know  that  she  produces  cotton,  rice,  indigo,  tar,  pitch,  tur 
pentine,  and  superior  timber.  You  know  that  her  soil  and 
climate  are  adapted  to  the  cereals,  wheat,  corn,  rye,  buck 
wheat,  and  oats.  But  you  probably  do  not  know  that  that 
State,  long  known  as  the  Eip  Van  Winkle  of  the  Union, 
from  which  more  than  fifty  thousand  free  white  people 
have  fled  to  the  two  States  of  Indiana  and  Illinois,  is  the 
land  of  wine  and  honey,  the  apple  and  peach,  the  fig  and 
pomegranate,  all  of  which  I  saw  prospering  in  open  field 
and  under  the  most  artless  culture.  Its  native  vines  made 
the  fortune  of  Longworth,  who  carried  cuttings  thence. 
The  wine-producing  vineyards  of  Western  Pennsylvania, 
around  the  base  and  on  the  islands  of  Lake  Erie,  and 
those  scattered  through  Missouri,  are  from  the  cuttings 
taken  from  the  native  vines  of  North  Carolina.  The 
Catawba,  the  Lincoln,  the  Isabella,  and  richer  than  all  the 
Scuppernong,  of  which,  as  it  has  not  yet  been  successfully 
transplanted,  Eastern  North  Carolina  has  the  monopoly. 
There  it  grows  spontaneously  as  a  weed. 


176  THE    SOUTH — ITS    RESOURCES   AND    WANTS. 

The  woods  and  hill-sides  teem  with  the  richest  honev- 
bearing  flowers,  and  the  bees  invite  you  to  put  up  but  a  rude 
box,  that  they  may  reward  your  kindness  with  the  sweet 
est  treasure.  There  is  not  a  vegetable  we  produce  that 
will  not  thrive  in  North  Carolina,  and  under  these  abound 
ing  stores  of  agricultural  wealth,  a  belt,  ranging  from  forty 
to  one  hundred  miles  wide  across  the  entire  State,  is  so 
richly  underlaid  with  gold  that  a  person  with  a  common 
frying  pan  may  wash  the  sands  of  many  of  the  rivulets 
and  make  from  one  to  three  dollars  per  day.  My  friends, 
as  I  travelled  from  day  to  day  through  this  native  wealth 
and  beauty  I  saw  how  sin  had  driven  man  out  of  Para 
dise,  for  never  had  I  seen  such  poverty  as  I  found  in  North 
Carolina,  save  in  South  Carolina,  Alabama,  and  Mississippi, 
where  people  are  starving  in  the  midst  of  nature's  richest 
bounties. 

You  cannot  comprehend  and  credit  this  statement.  I 
tell  you  it  is  true.  I  could  not  credit  it  myself.  It  was 
long  before  observation  enabled  me  fully  to  comprehend 
it.  Go  with  me  to  Mississippi.  I  will  take  you  to  Her- 
nando.  Once  Hernando  was  an  important  railroad  town 
and  station.  There  are  scattered  around  it  a  few  large  old 
mansions,  abandoned  and  going  to  ruin.  It  was  once  the 
centre  of  a  great  cotton-growing  region,  but  now,  as  far  as 
the  eye  could  range  from  the  platform  of  the  car,  we  saw 
nothing  but  sedge  grass,  a  surface  weed,  or  the  red  subsoil, 
washed  and  cut  by  countless  gullies,  till  under  the  bright 
sun  it  looked  like  a  myriad  flames  of  red  fire,  blazing  up 
from  the  earth. 

The  owners  of  that  once  rich  land  had  planted  it  each 
successive  year  with  cotton,  till  they  extracted  from  it 
every  agricultural  element,  and  those  fibrous  roots  with 
which  nature  mats  the  soil  and  protects  it  from  washing. 
In  response  to  a  question  as  to  the  extent  of  the  desola 
tion  we  beheld,  a  fellow-traveller,  a  Mississippian,  said,  "It 
is  pretty  wide.  There  is  not  a  plantation  within  some 
miles  of  the  station  on  which  a  family  could  make  a  liv 
ing,"  and  he  added,  "the  soil  was  always  light,  and  when 
the  rain  began  to  wash  it,  it  made  quick  work  of  it."  Skil 
ful  culture  would  not  only  have  saved  that  wide  region 
from  desolation,  but  added  to  its  wealth-producing  power. 

Come  with  me  again,  my  friends,  to  South  Carolina,  and 
behold  a  mother,  a  delicate  looking  white  woman,  who, 
having  "roped"  herself  to  a  plow,  is  striving  to  drag  it 


THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS.  177 

tli rough  the  earth,  while  her  son  apparently  about  eleven 
years  old,  endeavors  to  guide  it,  that  they  may  open  a  fur 
row  in  which  to  deposit  the  few  seeds  Northern  charity  has 
sent  them.  You  cannot  imagine  such  a  scene.  But  I  as 
sure  you  that  I  could  detain  you  for  hours  by  illustrations 
but  little  less  striking  than  these  of  the  terrible  results  of 
devoting  an  entire  people  to  the  production  of  a  few  bulky 
agricultural  products.  I  wish  you  to  remark  that  I  have 
not  spoken  of  the  negroes  of  the  South,  but  of  the  poor 
non-slaveholding  whites,  "  the  low  downs,"  as  I  often  heard 
them  called. 

What  would  we  in  Pennsylvania,  with  our  manifold  di 
versification  of  pursuits,  think  if  the  owner  of  a  farm  of 
one  hundred  acres  should  apply  to  the  Government  for  ra 
tions  to  support  his  family  ?  Yet  it  is  not  a  novel  or  un 
natural  sight  at  the  South.  Lieutenant  Colonel  J.  E.  Edie, 
of  the  8th  infantry,  is  post  commandant  at  Salisbury,  N. 
C.,  and  administers  the  affairs  of  the  Bureau  of  Refugees 
and  Freedmen  within  his  command.  I  recognized  in  him 
not  only  a  gallant  son  of  Pennsylvania,  but  an  old  personal 
friend.  It  happened  to  be  ration  day,  which  occurs,  I  be 
lieve,  once  a  fortnight,  and  with  my  companions  I  gladly 
accepted  his  invitation  to  his  office,  that  we  might  observe 
the  character  and  necessities  of  the  applicants.  They 
must  have  numbered  hundreds,  a  large  preponderance  of 
whom  were  whites.  Many  of  them  had  walked  more  than 
fifteen  miles  to  procure  a  little  corn  and  bacon. 

As  one  lean,  pale  woman  advanced  and  gave  her  name, 
the  Colonel  said  :  "  You  have  been  here  before,  and  I 
think  you  own  land."  "Yes,  sir,"  said  she;  "I  own  a  lit 
tle."  "  How  much  ? "  asked  he.  "About  a  hundred  acres." 
"How  much  of  it  is  cleared?"  "The  butt  end  of  it." 
"Well  then,  why  did  you  not  plant  it?"  "All  that  is 
cleared  is  planted."  "  What,  then,  brings  you  for  rations  ?  " 
"  Want,  Colonel ;  I  must  have  something  for  the  children 
to  eat  till  the  corn  ripens.  I  can't  make  it  ripen  till  the 
season  comes."  [A  voice — "They  are  too  lazy  to  work  ! "  ] 
No,  my  friend,  they  are  not  too  lazy  to  work.  They  are 
willing  to  work.  They  need  guidance  and  instruction.  I 
told  them  in  my  public  addresses  that  in  their  primitive 
way  they  work  harder  than  we.  ["  They  are  too  lazy  to 
work."]  No,  my  friend,  I  understand  them  better  than 
you.  You  would  deem  it  pretty  hard  work  to  walk  fifteen 
or  twenty  miles  for  a  few  pecks  of  corn  and  pounds  of  ba- 
12 


178  THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AXD   WANTS. 

con,  and  carry  them  on  your  shoulder  to  your  distant 
home. 

The  woman  of  whom  I  was  speaking  was  not  probably 
a  lazy  woman.  She  knew  nothing  of  our  agricultural  im 
plements  or  methods,  but  was  doubtless  regarded  by  her 
neighbors  as  an  adept  in  Southern  agriculture.  Like  her 
neighbors,  whose  lands  would  not  produce  cotton,  or  who 
did  not  own  laborers  to  cultivate  and  pick  it,  she  had 
planted  her  exhausted  acres  with  corn,  and  when  that  sin 
gle  crop  failed  the  country  was  famine-stricken,  as  Ireland 
was  when  rot  assailed  the  potato.  Yet  we  had  eaten,  the 
day  before,  at  Concord,  but  thirty  miles  distant,  at  the  hos 
pitable  table  of  Mr.  McDonald,  an  old  Pennsylvanian,  but 
long  a  citizen  of  North  Carolina,  a  variety  of  delicious 
vegetables,  among  which  were  potatoes  as  mealy  as  can  be 
grown  on  our  virgin  hill  sides. 

The  people  of  whom  I  speak  had  been  taught  to  believe 
that  cotton  was  the  one  thing  to  the  production  of  which 
the  South  should  devote  herself,  and  that  corn,  as  food  for 
"  mules  and  niggers,"  might,  with  propriety,  be  raised 
when  cotton  could  not.  A  former  Southern  leader  said  to 
me:  "We  bought  niggers  and  mules  to  raise  cotton,  and 
raised  cotton  to  buy  niggers  and  mules,"  and  I  good  hu- 
moredly  replied,  "  Yes,  and  your  continuous  culture  of 
cotton  having  eaten  up  your  land,  your  negroes  and  mules 
were  about  to  eat  you  when  you  began  the  war."  [Laugh 
ter  and  applause.]  Thus  it  came  that  destitution  and 
despair  brood  over  the  sunny  South,  while  its  unequaled 
water-power  runs  to  waste,  and  its  widely-diffused  and  in 
exhaustible  mines  of  gold,  silver,  copper,  lead,  iron,  etc., 
etc.,  and  coal  to  work  them,  lie  undisturbed  where  nature 
deposited  them. 

There  are  in  North  Carolina,  .as  the  census  shows,  47,000 
white  adults  who  cannot  read,  and  in  Virginia  74,000. 
These  figures,  I  apprehend,  indicate  the  general  condition 
of  the  South  in  this  respect.  In  their  ignorance  the  masses 
have  been  swayed  to  their  ruin  by  the  wealthy  and  ambi 
tious  men  who  dwell  among  them.  They  will  gladly  en 
rich  themselves  by  adopting  our  methods  and  pursuits 
when  they  come  to  understand  them.  When  I  told  them 
that  they  worked  harder  than  we,  and  at  more  exhausting 
labor ;  that  we  lifted  the  toil  that  bowed  them  from  the 
shoulders  of  man  and  devolved  it  upon  coal  and  iron,  and 
that  without  swinging  the  heavy  scythe  we  made  machinery 


THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES    AXD   WANTS.  179 

mow  and  reap  our  fields,  many  of  them  looked  incredu 
lous.  To  sustain  my  point  I  invited  their  attention  to  what 
they  had  all  seen,  that  ingeniously  contrived  mass  of  iron, 
a  locomotive,  and  begged  them  to  note  how  it  would,  when 
animated  by  a  little  water  from  one  of  their  brooks,  and  a 
little  coal  from  one  of  their  abounding  beds,  under  the 
guidance  of  a  single  man,  move,  at  a  speed  greater  than 
that  of  the  race  horse,  masses  of  freight  which  their  mules 
and  negroes  could  not  move. 

You  ask  what  are  the  chances  of  improving  these  peo 
pie  ?  The  great  difficulty  in  the  way  is  their  indifference 
to  or  contempt  for  education.  In  this  they  contrast  most 
strangely  with  the  freedmen  and  their  children. 

The  white  people  seemed  to  be  indifferent  to  education , 
but  at  Memphis,  New  Orleans,  Montgomery,  Atlanta,  the 
four  cities  of  North  Carolina,  aud  Danville,  Virginia,  we 
visited  freedmen's  schools,  and  I  do  but  state  the  simple 
truth  when  I  say  that  if  we  do  not  establish  schools,  and 
contrive  some  means  to  induce  the  white  people  of  the 
South  to  educate  their  children,  the  colored  people  will,  in 
five  years,  be  their  superiors  intellectually. 

By  day  the  freedmen's  schools  are  crowded  with  children 
from  five  years  upward,  and  at  night,  after  their  day's  work 
is  over,  with  men  and  women.  The  story  of  one  black 
man  was  this,  That  he  had  come  into  the  school,  and  asked 
whether  he  could  stay  there  until  he  could  get  an  educa 
tion.  He  was  asked  in  return  who  would  support  him. 
"I  will  support  myself  while  I  stay,"  said  he.  "I  got  a 
little  piece  of  land,  and  made  a  good  'crap,'  and  sold  it 
well ;  I  have  come  for  an  education  while  my  brother 
works  the  land  on  shares.  I  want  to  stay  here  until  I  can 
get  an  education."  He  will  get  an  education,  for  he  is  the 
first  scholar  in  one  of  the  finest  classified  schools  I  ever 
saw. 

Another  remarkable  thing  in  these  schools  is  the  largo 
proportion  of  white  pupils  found  in  them.  This,  doubtless, 
surprises  you,  after  what  I  have  just  said.  That  is  because 
you  have  not  visited  the  cities  of  the  South,  and  suppose 
that  the  question  of  the  color  of  a  person  depends  on  pris 
matic  rays,  pigments,  or  chemical  combinations.  That  is 
a  delusion.  Throughout  the  South  the  color  of  a  human 
being  is  not  a  question  of  science,  but  of  tradition;  and 
the  teachers  of  one  freedmen's  school,  in  which  there  was 
no  pupil  that  had  not  been  a  slave,  assured  us  that  quite 


180  THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS. 

twenty-five  per  cent,  of  the  scholars  would  be  recognized 
as  white  people  in  any  part  of  the  North.  This  gives  you 
the  key  to  the  abandonment  by  the  Southern  leaders  of  the 
narrow  dogma  that  slavery  was  the  true  position  of  the 
negro  and  their  assertion  of  the  broad  doctrine  that  slavery 
is  the  true  position  of  the  laborer.  This  occurred  about 
18-47,  and  I  remember  inviting  the  attention  of  such  of 
you  as  then  heard  me  to  it,  on  the  16th  of  September, 
1856,  in  my  address  at  Spring  Garden  Hall.  Promiscuous 
intercourse  had  expelled  the  blood  of  Africa  from  the  veins 
of  so  many  of  their  slaves  that  they  were  compelled  to 
take  this  position  or  fail  to  cover  by  their  logic  their  most 
valuable  property. 

But  you  ask,  "  What  is  the  spirit  and  temper  of  the 
Southern  people?"  There  is,  doubtless,  a  great  deal  of 
sullen  discontent.  The  time  has  not  yet  come  when  it 
would  be  safe  to  withdraw  the  military.  This  would  be 
unsafe.  Not  but  that  there  are  large  portions  of  the  South 
that  are  well  regulated  and  orderly,  without  any  troops 
within  fifty  or  a  hundred  miles  of  them.  I  have  referred 
to  Danville.  The  nearest  post  to  that  town  at  which  troops 
were  stationed  was  seventy-three  miles,  and  yet  order  pre 
vails  there  and  in  the  vicinity  as  perfectly  as  at  the  large 
stations.  Intelligent  people  all  over  the  South  are  wel 
coming  intercourse  with  the  North,  are  subscribing  to 
Northern  Republican,  agricultural,  and  religious  newspa 
pers,  and  are,  in  a  political  sense,  asking  earnestly  and 
prayerfully,  "What  must  we  do  to  be  saved?" 

The  colored  people  understand  themselves  and  the  ques 
tions  at  issue  thoroughly.  They  need  no  Northern  mis 
sionaries  among  them.  If  the  North  will  educate  them 
that  is  all  they  want,  to  free  them  from  the  shackles  of 
ignorance.  The  political  work  there  will  be  better  done 
by  themselves  than  through  Northern  visitors.  They  have 
among  them  orators  that  would  surprise  those  who  assert 
the  intellectual  inferiority  of  the  race.  L.  S.  Berry,  of 
Alabama,  who  did  but  know  his  letters  when  the  war 
ended,  is  said  to  be  one  of  the  most  remarkable  orators  in 
the  United  States;  and  it  is  claimed  that,  if  he  makes  a 
tour  through  the  North,  he  will  rival  Fred.  Douglass,  with 
all  his  scholarship  and  foreign  travel. 

In  North  Carolina  a  colored  man  narfted  Harris  has  the 
reputation  of  being  one  of  the  ablest  popular  orators  in  the 
State.  Jarnes  Simms,  the  brother  of  Thomas  Simms,  the 


THE    SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS.  181 

slave  who  was  taken  from  Boston  in  triumph,  is  said  to  be 
gifted  with  the  power  of  declamation  and  invective  almost 
beyond  any  living  American  orator ;  and  the  people  in 
every  town  in  which  we  were  entertained  did  not  fail  to 
bring  to  our  notice  men  who  were  slaves  two  years  ago, 
and  whom  they  now  cheerfully  recognize  as  their  political 
equals.  One  gentleman,  speaking  of  a  shoemaker,  said  to 
me  :  "  We  always  knew  he  had  better  sense  than  his  mas 
ter,  though  he  was  a  learned  judge." 

Some  of  you  have  heard  me  called  a  "  negro  worship 
per."  If  that  phrase  is  intended  to  characterise  one  who 
appreciated  the  intellect  and  character  of  the  Africo- Ameri 
can  people,  it  was  misapplied  to  me.  I  freely  admit  that  I 
had  done  the  race  gross  injustice  by  my  highest  estimate, 
and  a  few  years  will  demonstrate  the  fact  to  all  unpreju 
diced  minds. 

Poor  and  ignorant  as  they  were  when  they  escaped  from 
slavery,  they  are  rapidly  acquiring  property.  In  this  good 
work  members  of  the  Society  of  Friends  are  aiding  them 
most  judiciously  by  purchasing  land  in  large  tracts  and 
selling  it  to  them  in  small  quantities  at  cost,  and  on  time. 
I  saw  places  nicely  improved  on  the  last  payment  for  which 
seven  years  had  been  given,  but  which  two  years  had 
served  to  free  from  indebtedness.  They  have  neither  eaten 
nor  wasted  the  seeds  sent  them  by  Northern  benevolence 
or  the  Agricultural  Department,  but  around  each  freed- 
man's  home  where  these  have  gone  is  a  vegetable  garden, 
such  as  we  observe  in  our  rides  in  this  vicinity.  They  are 
an  improving  people,  and  will,  by  their  industry,  enterprise 
and  thrift,  regenerate  the  South. 

My  friends,  some  of  you,  tired  of  city  life,  may  think 
of  emigrating.  To  such,  I  say,  put  not  a  thousand  or  fif 
teen  hundred  miles  between  your  families  and  their  old 
homes  by  going  to  the  distant  West  or  Northwest.  There 
is  a  more  genial  climate  and  a  country  as  rich  and  beauti 
ful  within  a  few  hundred  miles  of  your  home,  where  you 
can  buy  agricultural  and  mineral  lands  at  from  two  to  five 
dollars  an  acre ;  in  which  you  can  buy  land  contiguous  to 
towns  destined,  under  the  influence  of  freedom,  soon  to  be 
large  cities,  whose  railroad  connections  are  already  estab 
lished,  at  from  five  to  fifteen  dollars  an  acre.  In  this  re 
gion  your  skill  as  machinists  will  be  of  immense  value. 
Many  of  the  rich  gold  and  copper  mines  of  North  Caro 
lina  have  already  passed  into  the  possession  of  Northern 


182  THE  SOUTH — ITS  BESOURCES  AND  WANTS. 

men,  and  are  being  worked  by  the  most  approved  ma 
chinery. 

As  experience  demonstrates  their  richness,  this  field 
will  become  largely  productive  of  wealth  and  employment. 
But  the  rivers  of  the  South  furnish  boundless  water-power, 
much  of  which  washes  beds  of  iron,  coal  and  limestone. 
I  have  visited  Lewiston,  Me.,  Nashua  and  Manchester,  N. 
H.,  and  Lowell  and  Lawrence,  Mass.,  and  I  assure  you  that 
a  single  stream  in  each  of  the  States  of  Alabama,  Georgia, 
South  Carolina,  and  North  Carolina,  furnishes  power  vastly 
in  excess  of  that  required  to  move  the  machinery  of  these 
cities.  Much  of  the  cotton  crop  will  yet  be  spun  and  woven 
by  this  power,  near  the  fields  on  which  it  is  grown.  To 
enterprising  arid  ingenious  emigrants  I  say,  go  to  the  rich 
and  fertile,  but  exhausted  South. 

What  is  required  to  regenerate  the  South  is  subsoil  ploughs, 
phosphates,  agricultural  implements  generally,  a  large  increase 
of  horses,  mules  and  horned  cattle,  a  steadily  increasing  supply 
of  steam  engines  and  machinery,  and  such  manufacturing 
machinery  as  can  be  moved  by  water-power.  These,  with  a 
comparatively  small  amount  of  cash  capital,  and  a  few  ear 
nest  men  to  teach  others  their  use  and  value,  would  in  a 
few  years  make  the  South  bloom  like  a  garden,  and  de 
velop  a  population  as  loyal  as  was  that  of  any  Northern 
State  during  the  war.  [Applause.]  The  interests  of 
Northern  capitalists  require  them  to  supply  these  potent 
agents  at  the  earliest  practicable  day. 

But,  my  laboring  friends,  when  I  advise  you  to  move 
South,  understand  me  to  couple  it  with  the  suggestion  that 
you  go  in  little  colonies,  say  of  ten  or  twenty  families. 
Carry  with  you  your  Northern  habits.  Arrange  for  the 
regular  receipt  of  the  papers  and  magazines  for  which  you 
now  subscribe,  and  let  one  of  your  number  be  at  least  ca 
pable  of  conducting  a  fair  country  school.  In  this  way 
you  will  regenerate  the  neighborhood  into  which  you  go, 
and  preserve  your  children  from  the  ignorance  which  pre 
vails.  A  single  man  or  family  going  there  would  uncon 
sciously  lapse  into  the  habits  which  prevail.  Again,  let  me 
say,  do  not  think  of  going  to  work  for  wages.  There  is 
little  demand  as  yet  for  skilled  labor,  and  unskilled  labor 
is  in  terrible  excess  of  the  existing  demand. 

The  colored  hands  in  the  tobacco  factories  of  Danville, 
Va.,  can  earn  about  nine  dollars  per  week  ;  but  in  one  of 
the  towns  of  North  Carolina  we  saw  girls  and  women,  who 


THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS.  18o 

in  a  Philadelphia  factory  would  receive  from  four  to  six 
dollars  per  week,  working  long  days  in  a  tobacco  fac 
tory  for  twenty-five  cents  a  day.  One  of  the  applicants 
to  Colonel  Edie  for  rations  stated,  and  established  the  fact, 
that  her  husband  worked  in  a  sawmill  for  thirty  cents  a 
day ;  and  the  best  laborers  in  their  vicinity,  without  dis 
tinction  of  color,  are  employed  in  the  rich  gold  mines  of 
the  latter  State  at  one  dollar  per  day. 

In  this  picture  of  helpless  destitution  I  am  not  portray 
ing  the  effects  of  war.  No  ;  the  fruitful  seeds  of  this  mis 
ery  were  brought  from  Africa  in  slave  ships.  It  was  not 
the  war  that  reduced  Norfolk  from  the  first  commercial 
port  of  the  Union  to  the  position  of  an  inconsiderable 
town  without  foreign  commerce.  The  war  did  not  convert 
the  rich  and  beautiful  land  around  Hernando  into  an  arid 
waste.  The  war  did  not  drive  the  once  proud  occupants 
from  those  long-abandoned  mansions,  whose  columns  and 
architraves  are  now  so  dilapidated,  or  from  those  villages 
of  huts,  about  which  the  poisonous  vine  has  for  years 
twined  its  beautiful  but  fatal  embrace. 

Said  one  who  for  years  recognized  Mr.  Calhoun  as  his 
inspired  leader,  but  now  has  but  little  hope  for  the  South  : 
"  We  have  sacrificed  our  country  to  cotton,  mules,  and 
niggers,  and  if  you  regenerate  it,  its  prosperity  will  be  our 
lasting  reproach.  They  were  most  happy  who  fell  in  the 
war,  before  the  delusion  was  quite  dispelled."  Said  another : 
"  Why  did  not  the  North  and  South  understand  each  other  ? 
I  believed  that  I  was  fighting  for  the  prosperity  of  my 
country ;  but  some  months'  imprisonment  in  one  of  your 
forts  and  a  plentiful  supply  of  your  newspapers  satisfied 
me  that  I  was  fighting  against  every  cherished  desire  of  my 
heart." 

The  South  must  be  regenerated,  and  we  of  the  North 
must  do  it.  There  are,  however,  many  there  who  will  aid 
us  in  the  work,  but  we  must  plan  and  guide  it.  Let  our 
statesmen  traverse  the  South,  and,  as  occasion  offers,  speak 
frankly,  bating  no  jot  or  breath  of  their  opinions,  but  ut 
tering  them  courteously  ;  and  if  any  of  you  has  a  friend 
in  any  one  of  the  States,  send  him  your  paper  daily  after 
you  have  read  it.  What  they  need  is  to  understand  us, 
our  habits  and  purposes.  When  in  my  several  addresses 
I  told  them — not  the  colored  people,  or  the  "  low  downs," 
but  the  wealthier  portion  of  my  audiences — that,  masters 
as  they  had  been  of  thousands  of  acres  and  hundreds  of 


184:  THE   SOUTH — ITS   RESOURCES   AND   WANTS. 

slaves,  they  had  never  been  able  to  provide  themselves  and 
families  with  many  of  the  best  results  of  wealth  which 
enter  into  the  daily  life  of  a  Philadelphia  workingman, 
they  would  look  skeptical ;  but  after  I  had  described  our 
neat  two-story  houses  with  four  rooms  each,  and  the  outer 
kitchen  and  bath-room  supplied  with  hot  water  from  the 
range,  and  lighted  throughout  with  gas,  and  of  the  large, 
well-ventilated  school-house  for  the  children,  near  home  ; 
the  public  library  or  institute  near  by  ;  the  choice  among 
churches  of  all  denominations,  the  cheap  daily  newspaper, 
and  other  things  familiar  to  you  all — most  of  them  would 
admit  the  correctness  of  my  proposition.  We  can  thus 
teach  them  much,  and  the  time  has  come  when  many  of 
those  who  were  recently  our  foes  are  willing  to  hear  us 
and  co-operate  with  us  in  any  good  work  for  the  poor 
among  whom  they  dwell. 

Let  us,  then,  my  friends,  while  manfully  defending  all 
that  is  good  in  our  opinions  or  institutions,  endeavor  to 
forget  the  past  and  strive  to  improve  the  future.  Yester 
day  is  gone,  no  man  knows  whither,  but  to-morrow  is  be 
fore  us,  with  its  inevitable  duties  and  its  possible  blessings 
or  calamities.  Let  each  man  labor  within  the  limits  pre 
scribed  by  good  conscience,  to  promote  his  own  welfare 
and  that  of  his  family,  for  so  all  will  be  blessed.  In  the 
development  of  the  agricultural,  mineral,  and  manufactur 
ing  resources  of  the  country,  work,  and  wages  will  be  se 
cured  to  all,  and  ample  opportunity  for  daring  enterprise 
afforded  to  the  most  restless. 

Then  will  sneering  Europe  discover  that  the  Union  is 
not  only  indivisible  and  indestructible — [applause] — but 
that  the  atmosphere  of  our  country,  from  Alaska,  as  Mr. 
Sumner  calls  our  newly-acquired  possessions,  to  the  Rio 
Grande,  is  so  pure  that  no  slave  can  breathe  it.  [Applause 
and  cheers.] 

Again  thanking  you,  my  friends  and  neighbors,  for  this 
manifestation  of  your  personal  regard,  I  pray  that  God's 
best  blessing  may  follow  you  to  your  homes. 


AMERICAN  INDUSTRY  AND  FINANCE. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  AT  THE  Music  HALL,  MILWAUKEE, 
SEPTEMBER  24,  1867.  REPORTED  FOR  THE  DAILY 
SENTINEL,  AND  REVISED  BY  THE  AUTHOR. 

Ladies  and  Gentlemen :  The  United  States  should  be  the 
first  commercial  power  of  the  world.  But  she  is  not.  She 
is  the  chief  commercial  dependency  of  Great  Britain.  With 
her  extended  sea-coast,  her  unlimited  agricultural  capacity, 
and  as  yet  unexplored  mineral  resources,  she  should  be 
the  leading  manufacturing  nation  of  the  world;  and  that 
nation  which  manufactures  more  than  it  consumes  of  arti 
cles  of  general  use  universally  leads  in  commerce.  But 
no  nation  that  has  contented  itself  with  producing  bulky 
raw  material  has  ever  attained  commercial  dignity. 
History  names  no  such  one.  We  are  not  in  the  position 
we  should  be — the  leader  of  the  civilization  of  the  world 
— because  this  has  been  our  policy,  and  we  have  preferred 
that  England  should  spin  and  weave  our  cotton  and  wool, 
should  fashion  coal,  limestone,  and  iron  ore  into  implements 
for  our  use,  and  rails  to  lay  over  our  limestone  beds,  ore 
banks,  and  coal  mines.  We  are  truly  enough  her  best 
customer ;  and  are  tending  toward  bankruptcy  and  increas 
ing  our  foreign  indebtedness  by  exporting  national,  State, 
and  corporation  bonds  in  exchange  for  consumable  com 
modities,  for  the  production  of  which  we  have  abundant 
raw  materials.  Last  year,  if  we  may  accept  the  statement 
of  Secretary  McCullough,  we  imported  $100,000,000  more 
than  we  exported,  including  our  entire  production  of  gold. 
This  year,  down  to  the  report  of  September  4,  I  find  by 
the  custom-house  statistics  that  our  importations  at  New 
York  are  §171,178,058,  and  our  exports  only  $124,978,938. 
England  pats  us  on  the  head  and  says,  "Good  boy; 
you  are  not  only  our  favorite  son,  though  you  did  tear 
away  from  the  apron-strings,  but  we  are  ready  to  call  you 
our  brother,  sister,  or  uncle,  as  you  please,  so  long  as  you 
maintain  the  profitable  commercial  relations  now  existing 

185 


186  AMERICAN  INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE. 

between  us.  You  buy  from  us  more  than  any  of  our  colo 
nies  or  other  people.  But  for  you  our  balance-sheet  would 
last  year  have  made  a  sad  exhibit.  Our  export  trade  in 
cotton  goods  fell  off  about  $5,000,000;  our  exports  of  silk 
goods  fell  off  nearly  $1,000,000 ;  and  but  for  the  increase 
in  the  American  demand  for  iron,  our  iron  trade  would 
have  fallen  off  in  a  larger  degree  than  these."  True  it  is, 
that  we  thus  buy  from  her  from  choice,  and  that  she  buys 
cotton  and  tobacco  from  us  because  she  cannot  buy  them 
anywhere  else.  She  buys  from  us  nothing  that  she  can 
get  from  other  nations.*  A  theory  is  abroad  that  she 
largely  consumes  the  cereals  of  the  West.  It  is  false,  and 
I  was  infinitely  shocked,  the  other  night,  at  hearing  Eev. 
Newman  Hall,  in  the  midst  of  the  most  pious  ejaculations, 
exclaim  that  half  the  wheat  eaten  in  England  is  raised  in 
the  Western  States  of  America  ;  and  when  on  the  succeed 
ing  evening  I  addressed  the  people  of  Springfield,  I  cor 
rected  his  statement  and  apologized  for  it,  saying  that  he 
had  entered  a  field  with  which  he  was  not  familiar.  But 
in  reading  the  report  of  the  speech  he  made  at  St.  Louis, 
while  I  was  thus  defending  his  veracity  in  Springfield,  I 
find  that  he  not  only  reiterated  the  assertion,  but  added : 
"  I  have  made  a  calculation,  and  ascertained  that  a  loaf 
made  of  your  flour  can  be  bought  cheaper  in  England  than 
here  in  Missouri."  My  friends  that  statement  is  demon- 
strably  false.  No  such  fact  can  be  ascertained  by  calcula 
tion.  Bread  is  not  as  cheap  in  England  as  in  Missouri. 
Nor  has  England  ever  bought  from  the  United  States  one- 
half  of  one  per  cent,  of  her  wheat. 

In  the  first  place  she  raises  about  eighty  per  cent,  of  her 
own  wheat.     That  leaves  but  twenty  per  cent,  to  divide 


*  Take,  for  example,  that  of  the  United  States  and  France  as  most  striking. 
In  1868,  we  imported  from  the  United  States  no  less  than  £8,892,394,  in  gold  and 
silver,  and  we  sent  out  only  £112,519.  As  a  contrast  to  this  we  sent  to  France, 
£9,011,394,  and  brought  home  only  £1,325,487.  The  balance  of  trade,  so  far  as 
gold  and  silver  could  show  it,  was  £8,779,875  in  our  favor  with  the  American 
States,  and  £7,685,907  against  us  with  France.  How  was  this?  The  United 
States  took  the  produce  of  our  industry  to  that  extent  expressed  by  the  sum  stated 
over  and  above  what  they  sent  us  chiefly  in  useful  produce  for  the  masses  of  our 
people.  But  the  money  passed  at  once  into  the  hands  of  those  to  whom  France 
sends  her  silks  and  wines,  and  (over  and  above  the  value  of  a  vast  amount  of 
goods  of  a  substantial  character)  it  was  spent  in  luxury.  Our  large  export  to 
France  might  have  brought  over  a  vast  supply  to  feed  the  hungry  and  clothe  the 
naked;  but  the  power  over  it  was  in  hands  whose  wishes  and  tastes  gave  it  a 
different  destination.  We  sent  to  France,  in  value,  £12,862,668,  chiefly  useful 
articles,  besides  the  balance  in  money  we  have  stated,  and  we  got  back,  almost 
exclusively  in  articles  of  luxury,  £33,033,401. — Social  Politics,  Kirk. 


AMEKICAN   INDUSTRY   AND    FINANCE.  187 

among  the  other  nations  of  the  world.  Of  the  deficit  she 
obtains,  as  nearly  as  can  be  calculated  from  her  statistics, 
from  sixty-eight  to  seventy  per  cent,  from  Russia  and 
Prussia.  She  obtains  largely  more  from  France  than  she 
does  from  the  United  States.  She  obtains  twice  as  much 
from  poor,  sick  Turkey  as  she  does  from  the  broad  United 
States  of  America,  and  yet  this  emissary  of  the  Free-trade 
League  is  under  the  guise  of  religion  reiterating  this  in 
famously  false  statement  to  the  people  of  the  entire  West. 

You  may  ask  what  this  has  to  do  with  American  indus 
try  and  finance,  announced  for  discussion  this  evening  ? 
1  think  you  will  find  as  we  proceed  that  it  is  relevant.  I 
think  you  will  agree  with  rne  that  if  Illinois  will  develop 
that  wonderful  coal  bed  she  has  underlying  35,000  square 
miles  of  her  territory ;  if  Indiana  will  develop  that  part 
of  the  same  bed,  containing  15,000  square  miles;  and  Mis 
souri,  Kansas,  and  Iowa  bring  into  use  a  small  portion 
of  the  seventy  odd  thousand  square  miles  that  underlie 
them ;  that  if  you  will  work  the  iron  ore  and  limestone 
of  Wisconsin,  and  Illinois  will  bring  into  play  that  great 
condensation  of  the  elements  of  iron  that  underlies  the 
southern  tiers  of  her  counties;  if  Missouri  will  develop  her 
beds  of  tin,  and  bring  her  copper  mines  into  rivalry  with 
those  of  Michigan  and  Wisconsin,  we  can  withdraw  from 
England  much  of  the  trade  on  which  she  lives,  and  thus 
without  striking  a  blow  overthrow  that  enemy  which, 
during  our  recent  struggle,  drove  our  commerce  from  the 
sea,  by  hoisting  the  flag  of  the  Confederacy  on  British 
ships,  armed  with  British  men  and  weapons.  [Applause.] 

Some  of  you  are  Irishmen ;  others  are  the  descendants 
of  Irishmen.  If  you  would  see  the  green  and  beautiful 
old  fatherland  free,  and  Irishmen  counted  as  men,  and 
equal  to  any  English  lord  on  election  day,  you  should 
strive  to  develop  our  resources,  and  regenerate  Ireland  by 
reducing  the  wealth  and  power  of  England.  [Applause.] 

Mr.  Hall  pleads  for  England's  supremacy,  and  I  for  the 
commercial  independence  of  the  United  States,  and  this 
allusion  to  him  has  something  to  do  with  what  I  have 
to  say.  I  am  here  begging  an  audience,  as  I  have  done 
elsewhere  in  the  West,  to  permit  me  to  utter  a  warning 
which  relates  to  the  interest  of  our  broad  country,  and 
which  specially  touches  the  interests  of  the  people  of  Wis 
consin.  I  have  recently  travelled  over  seven  of  the  dis 
rupted  Southern  States.  I  saw  much,  and  learned  more 


188  AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE. 

through  intercourse  with  the  people,  and  still  more  from 
a  large  correspondence  that  grew  out  of  my  visit,  and 
from  many  pamphlets  and  newspapers  since  sent  me  by 
citizens  of  the  South. 

The  rebellion  and  its  suppression  have  rendered  an  entire 
revolution  in  the  industries  of  America  inevitable.  No 
State  in  the  Union  is  more  directly  interested  in  this 
change  than  Wisconsin,  and  yet  few  of  your  wisest  and 
most  far-seeing  men  seem  to  have  learned  the  fact. 
They  still  think  that  the  South  was  an  agricultural  coun 
try.  Why,  gentlemen,  do  agricultural  countries  go  abroad 
to  buy  food  for  man  and  beast?  I  thought  they  raised  it. 
Yet,  true  it  is,  that  before  the  war,  the  West  and  North 
west  fed  the  South.  Your  wheat,  corn,  beef,  bacon,  and 
hay  went  to  the  Southern  States  for  a  market.  I  do  not 
speak  specially  of  the  productions  of  your  own  State,  but 
of  the  States  of  the  West  and  Northwest. 

You  have  no  adequate  foreign  market !  France,  Eng 
land,  and  Belgium,  in  the  three  years  preceding  the  break 
ing  out  of  the  war,  purchased  annually — the  three  nations 
combined — but  ten  millions  of  agricultural  products  from 
the  United  States — including  wool,  lumber,  pork,  wheat, 
flour,  and  corn.  But  $10,000,000  !  That  was  not  an  ade 
quate  market  for  the  productions  of  the  West ;  and  yet  it 
was  all  the  manufacturing  nations  of  Europe  purchased. 
Your  best  foreign  customers  were  the  non -manufacturing 
countries  south  of  the  Gulf  of  Mexico,  and  Central  and 
South  America,  whose  people  took  about  $30,000,000  of 
your  productions  in  each  of  the  years  referred  to,  or  three 
times  as  much  as  all  transatlantic  nations.  The  market 
on  which  you  relied  was  in  the  South,  and  the  cities  and 
manufacturing  districts  of  the  Eastern  States.  Pennsyl 
vania  is  a  great  wheat-growing  State,  but  she  cannot  sup 
ply  the  demands  of  her  people,  and  half  her  miners  and 
operatives  are  fed  from  your  fields.  This  Eastern  market 
is  still  yours,  but  you  are  no  longer  to  feed  the  people  of 
the  Southern  States.  Nor  is  that  all.  Hereafter  you  are 
to  encounter  Southern  provision  growers  in  the  markets 
of  the  East — in  the  southern  part  of  this  hemisphere,  and 
the  small  market  open  to  you  in  Europe — and  to  compete 
with  them  after  they  shall  have  taken  the  cream  off.  If 
you  do  not  diversify  your  productions,  you  will  soon  be 
ready  to  cry  to  the  Lord  to  send  drought  or  excessive  rain 
to  destroy  crops,  and  enable  you  to  sell  your  wheat,  corn, 


AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE.  189 

and  cattle.  You  will  feel  that  a  curse  has  fallen  on  you 
if  this  year's  generous  crops  shall  be  vouchsafed  next  year. 
You  may  say  this  is  strange  talk.  Gentlemen,  I  recently 
travelled  between  twelve  and  fourteen  hundred  miles  by 
railroad,  from  New  Orleans  to  Baltimore — between  corn 
and  cotton,  cotton  and  corn,  and  if  I  were  under  oath,  I 
could  not  say  which  I  saw  most  of — cotton  or  corn. 
Where  the  land  had  been  cultivated,  and  the  crop  gath 
ered,  the  stubble  of  wheat  remained.  Where  I  saw  other 
crops  than  cotton  or  corn  growing,  as  I  did  in  northern 
North  Carolina  and  Virginia,  it  was  wheat — the  great 
staple  of  Wisconsin.  During  the  three  days  I  passed  in 
St.  Louis  last  week,  I  saw  corn  from  Mississippi  and  Ala 
bama  being  delivered  from  steamers,  instead  of  being  ship 
ped  thence  to  Mississippi  and  Alabama,  as  it  used  to  be ; 
and  I  also  saw  a  drove  that  would  have  gratified  the 
eye  of  any  cattle-fancier,  of  long-horned  Texas  cattle, 
driven  through  the  streets  of  St.  Louis,  which  looked  to 
me  amazingly  like  the  South  feeding  the  North,  at  least 
to  some  extent.  From  Nashville  they  are  shipping  corn 
and  wheat  to  Ohio,  Indiana,  and  the  Eastern  States.  The 
corn  crop  of  Indiana,  and  even  most  of  Ohio,  has  been 
blighted.  But,  you  may  say,  I  am  an  unskilful  observer. 
Will  you,  therefore,  pardon  me  for  reading  a  brief  extract 
from  a  well-considered  official  statement  ?  The  Confede 
rate  Legislature  of  Louisiana  instructed  the  Governor  to 
select  some  competent  gentleman  to  make  a  survey  of  the 
mineral,  manufacturing,  and  agricultural  resources  of 
Louisiana,  and  report  to  the  Legislature.  Allen,  the  Con 
federate  Governor,  selected  for  that  duty  Hon.  John  B. 
Robertson,  a  man  of  marked  ability  and  great  breadth  of 
study.  I  hold  his  report  in  my  hand.  Pardon  me  while 
I  read  you  a  brief  extract : 

"  "Wheat  with  us  should  be  planted  in  September,  October,  or 
November.  It  is  a  beautiful  season  for  preparing  the  ground.  It 
may  then  be  reaped  in  the  last  half  of  April  and  May,  a  time  usuallv 
selected  for  making  brick,  on  account  of  its  fair  weather.  The  daily 
quotations  show  that  Southern  flour,  raised  in  Missouri,  Tennessee, 
and  Virginia,  brings  from  three  to  five  dollars  more  per  barrel  than 
the  best  New  York  Genesee  flour.  Louisiana  and  Texas  flour  is  far 
superior  to  the  Tennessee,  Virginia,  or  Missouri,  owing  to  the  supe 
rior  dryness,  and  the  fact  that  it  contains  more  gluten,  and  does  not 
ferment  so  easily.  Southern  flour  makes  better  dough  and  macca- 
roni  than  Northern  or  Western  flour;  it  is  better  adapted  for  trans 
portation  over  the  sea.  and  keeps  better  in  the  tropics.  It  is  there- 


190  AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND    FINANCE. 

fore  the  flour  that  is  sought  after  for  Brazil,  Central  America, 
Mexico,  and  the  West  India  markets,  which  are  at  our  doors.  A 
barrel  of  strictly  Southern  flour  will  make  twenty  pounds  more  bread 
than  Illinois  flour,  because,  being  so  much  drier,  it  takes  up  more 
water  in  making  up.  In  addition  to  this  vast  superiority  of  our 
grain,  we  have  other  advantages  over  the  Western  States  in  grain 
growing.  Our  climate  advances  the  crop  so  rapidly  that  we  can  cut 
our  wheat  six  weeks  before  a  scythe  is  put  into  the  fields  of  Illinois; 
and  being  so  near  the  Gulf,  we  avoid  the  delays  in  shipping  and  the 
long  transportation,  the  cost  of  which  consumes  nearly  one-half  of  the 
product  of  the  West.  These  advantages,  the  superior  quality  of  the 
flour,  the  earlier  harvest,  and  the  cheap  and  easy  shipment,  enable 
us  absolutely  to  forestall  the  West  in  the  foreign  demand,  which  is 
now  about  40,000,000  of  bushels  annually,  and  is  rapidly  increasing ; 
and  also  in  the  Atlantic  seaboard  trade.  Massachusetts,  it  is  calcu 
lated,  raises  riot  more  than  one  month's  supply  of  flour  for  her  vast 
population.  New  York  not  six  months'  supply  for  her  population, 
and  the  other  Atlantic  States  in  like  proportion.  This  vast  deficit 
is  now  supplied  by  the  Western  States,  and  the  trade  has  enriched 
the  West,  and  has  built  railroads  in  every  direction  to  carry  towards 
the  East  the  gold-producing  grain.  We  can,  if  we  choose,  have  a 
monopoly  of  this  immense  trade,  and  the  time  may  not  be  far  dis 
tant  when,  in  the  dispensation  of  Providence,  the  West,  which  con 
tributed  so  largely  to  the  uprooting  of  our  servile  system  and  the 
destruction  of  our  property,  will  find  that  she  has  forced  us  into  a 
rivalry  against  which  she  cannot  compete,  and  that  she  will  have  to 
draw  not  only  her  supplies  of  cotton,  sugar,  and  rice,  but  even  her 
breadstuff's  from  the  South. 

"A  close  estimate  of  all  the  expenses,  in  raising  a  crop  of  wheat 
or  barley,  or  a  crop  of  cane  or  cotton,  placed  in  juxtaposition,  would 
show  largely  in  favor  of  the  grain  crop.  In  raising  the  grain,  the 
full  force  need  be  hired  and  fed  no  longer  time  than  two  or  three 
months  of  the  year,  while  in  the  other  crops  they  must  be  hired  and 
fed  for  twelve  months. 

"  Vast  numbers  of  freedraen  could  be  hired  for  one  or  two  months 
at  the  time  for  liberal  day  wages.  This  system  is  in  conformity 
with  their  ideas  and  notions  of  work ;  they  reluctantly  contract  for 
a  year.  Rye,  barley,  and  buckwheat  have  been  tried  in  Louisiana. 
Barley  and  buckwheat  are  both  natives  of  a  Southern  climate,  and 
flourish  remarkably  well  here.  In  Texas,  during  the  past  year,  the 
papers  state  that  eighty-five  bushels  of  barley  were  made  to  the 
acre  in  Central  Texas ;  sixty  bushels  could  easily  be  made  here,  and 
as  it  is  superior  to  the  Northern  barley  for  brewing,  the  fourteen 
breweries  of  New  Orleans  would  alone  consume  vast  quantities  of  it. 
Barley,  as  compared  with  corn,  is  a  better  food  for  stock,  particu 
larly  work  stock,  as  it  is  muscle-producing,  and  does  not  heat  the 
system  like  the  oil  or  fat-producing  property  of  corn,  and  while  it 
produces  three  times  as  much  to  the  acre  of  grain,  the  stock  con 
sumes  all  the  straw.  A  hand  can  cultivate  much  more  ground  in 
barley  than  corn,  and  it  needs  no  work  after  planting.  Grain  grow 
ing  would  not  only  be  profitable  to  the  planter,  but  it  would  build 
up  New  Orleans,  and  make  her  the  greatest  city  on  the  continent. 

"What  New  Orleans  lacks  is  summer  trade;  her  business  has 
been  heretofore  compressed  into  six  or  eight  months.  After  the 


AMERICAN   INDUSTRY    AND   FINANCE.  191 

cotton  and  sugar  crops  were  received  and  disposed  of,  the  merchants 
and  tradesmen  had  nothing-  to  do.  Most  of  them  went  north  with 
their  families,  leaving  New  Orleans  a  prey  to  epidemics,  when  a 
small  portion  of  the  very  money  which  they  had  earned  in  New 
Orleans,  and  were  spending  so  lavishly  abroad,  would  have  perfected 
sanitary  measures,  which  would  have  protected  those  from  the  epi 
demics.  During  this  season  of  inactivity  nearly  all  branches  of 
business  are  suspended ;  the  merchant  must,  however,  pay  house 
rent,  insurance,  clerk's  hire,  and  other  incidental  expenses ;  must 
lose  interest  on  his  investments,  and  have  his  goods  and  wares  dam 
aged  by  rust,  dust,  moth,  and  mould.  If  the  cultivation  of  grain 
were  begun  and  encouraged  around  New  Orleans,  grain  would  pour 
in  during  the  month  of  May,  and  the  summer  months,  and  would  fill 
up  this  fatal  hiatus  in  our  trade. 

"  The  merchant  would  be  compelled  to  reside  here  in  summer  as 
well  as  winter,  and  he  would  be  forced  on  his  own  account  to  lend 
his  time  and  money  towards  building  up  the  city,  and  improving  its 
health. 

"  Every  branch  of  business  would  be  kept  up  then  throughout  the 
whole  year,  and  our  own  steamships  would  supply  the  countries 
south  of  us  with  provisions,  and  we  should  not  as  now  be  compelled 
to  import  coffee  by  way  of  Cincinnati.  Northern  and  European 
emigrants  knowing  that  our  grain  growing  was  more  profitable  than 
at  the  North,  and  that  they  could  grow  grain  without  working  dur 
ing  the  summer  months  in  that  sun  they  have  been  wrongfully 
taught  to  dread,  would  flock  to  our  lands ;  and  of  course,  where  pro 
visions  and  all  other  necessaries  of  life  would  be  cheap,  manufactures 
would  necessarily  spring  up  to  work  up  the  raw  materials  so  abun 
dant  there.  I  have  thus  lengthily  urged  the  cultivation  of  the  cere 
als,  because  I  find  so  little  is  known  among  the  most  intelligent  as 
to  the  capabilities  of'our  State  in  this  respect,  and  because,  too,  I 
think  that  therein  lies  the  true  secret  of  recuperation  and  permanent 
prosperity  for  our  people.  It  is  a  business  which  all  classes  of  agri 
culturists  may  profitably  engage  in,  from  the  poor  farmer  of  the  pine 
hills  to  the  rich  planter  of  the  coast.  It  is  a  business  in  which  every 
landholder,  lessee,  laborer,  mechanic,  manufacturer,  tradesman,  mer 
chant,  ship-owner,  and,  indeed,  every  citizen  is  deeply  interested,  as 
it  is  a  question  of  large  profits  and  cheap  bread,  and  the  State  of 
Louisiana  and  the  United  States  have  a  deep  concern  in  it,  as  large 
owners  of  land  in  the  State.  I  have  placed  grain  first  in  the  list  of 
productions,  for,  looking  to  the  future,  I  am  sure  that  grain  will 
become  our  leading  staple,  and  that  New  Orleans  is  destined  to  be 
come  the  leading  grain  market,  in  the  world."  * 

*  The  following  Associated  Press  dispatch  is  strikingly  confirmatory  of  my  pre 
diction  : 

"  NEW  ORLKANS,  July  1st,  1871. — The  Cotton  Exchange  Committee  on  statis 
tics  and  information  made  reports  upon  the  growing  cotton  and  grain  crop,  with 
dates  from  the  15th  to  the  20th  of  June.  The  following  is  the  summary  : 

"  MISSISSIPPI. — Cotton. — Reduction  of  acreage  20  to  25  per  cent.,  with  an  aver 
age  of  half  to  three-quarters  the  yield  of  last  year  per  acre.  Corn. — Acreage  in 
creased  25  to  40  per  cent.  The  latest  reports  indicate  a  short  yield  per  acre. 

"LOUISIANA. —  Cotton. — Reduction  of  acreage  10  to  12  per  cent.  Crop  three 
weeks  backward.  Considerably  injured,  especially  in  the  low  lands,  by  rain  and 
lice.  Corn. — Nearly  sufficient  for  home  consumption  planted. 

"ARKANSAS. — Cotton. — Reduction  of  acreage  25  to  33  per  cent.,  with  proper- 


192  AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE. 

In  support  of  these  views  I  have  with  me,  but  am  not 
going  to  detain  you  with  extracts  from  it,  an  address  made 
at  the  close  of  the  agricultural,  mechanical,  and  industrial 
fair  in  New  Orleans,  by  Wm.  M.  Burwell,  of  Virginia,  in 
which  the  Southern  people  are  urged,  as  they  are  by  Mr. 
Robertson,  to  divide  their  lands  and  to  remember  that  the 
South  has  three  seasons  ;  that  wheat  matures  in  the  spring ; 
that  corn  matures  at  midsummer  ;  and  that  cotton  is  a  fall 
crop  ;  and  advised  to  take  advantage  of  all  the  seasons. 
These  gentlemen  agree,  as  do  a  score  of  writers  whose 
communications  I  have  with  me,  in  urging  the  people  to 
put  not  more  than  one-tenth  of  their  land  in  cotton,  and 
the  remainder  in  grass  and  diversified  crops  of  food.  They 
tell  them  that  the  South  abounds  in  seaports,  that  the 
grain  of  every  part  of  the  South  can  be  got  to  market  in 
bulk  in  vessels,  in  which  a  bushel  of  wheat  may  be  car 
ried  twenty-three  thousand  miles — from  San  Francisco  to 
Liverpool — cheaper  than  it  can  be  carried  from  Minnesota 
or  Kansas  to  New  York  over  railroads  ;  and  that  as  theirs 
is  the  early  season  they  can  avenge  themselves  upon  the 
West  and  North  by  pre- occupy  ing  the  markets.  These 
are  not  pleasant  tidings  to  bring  to  a  people  prosperous  as 
are  those  of  the  West,  and  so  identified  with  their  present 
pursuits  that  they  will  yield  or  modify  them  reluctantly. 

My  fellow-citizens,  notwithstanding  these  unpleasant 
auguries,  the  future  of  the  West  was  never  so  bright  as  it 
is  to-day.  The  cloud  that  overshadows  your  prospect  is 
but  the  mist  that  lingers  over  a  mountain  stream.  The 
sun  is  rising  yonder  and  will  dispel  it,  and  you  will  then 
see  the  beauty  of  the  golden  valley!  Yes,  the  rebellion 


tionate  increase  in  grain.  Prospects  generally  good,  except  in  the  southern 
portion  of  the  State,  where  not  more  than  half  of  last  year's  yield  per  acre  is 
anticipated.  The  grain  crop  is  very  promising. 

"  TCXAS. — Information  mostly  from  the  northeast  portion  of  the  State.  Cot 
ton. — Reduction  of  acreage  25  to  33  per  cent.,  with  a  corresponding  increase  in 
grain.  Cotton  two  weeks  backward,  though  with  a  favorable  season  an  average 
crop  per  acre  is  expected. 

"ALABAMA. —  Cotton. — Reduction  of  acreage  10  to  20  per  cent.  Crop  three 
weeks  backward.  The  average  production  per  acre  will  be  less  than  last  year. 
Grain. — Increased  acreage  20  to  30  percent.  Fair  prospect. 

"  GEORGIA. — Cotton  accounts  meagre,  embracing  the  west  centre  and  centre 
of  the  State,  and  thence  northeast.  Decrease  of  acreage  20  to  33J  per  cent.,  in 
the  northeast,  and  15  in  other  sections  heard  from.  Condition  unpromising; 
half  to  three-quarters  per  acre  of  last  year's  yield  expected.  Grain. — Corres 
ponding  increase  of  acreage.  Prospect  unpromising. 

"  TENNESSEE. — Information  confined  to  the  western  part  of  the  Stnte.  Cotton. 
— Decrease  of  acreage  5  to  12£  per  cent.,  with  prospects  of  an  average  yield  per 
acre.  Grain. — Considerable  increase  of  acreage.  Prospects  good." 


AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE,  193 

struck  the  shackles  from  the  industries  and  enterprises  of 
the  West,  and  has  opened  to  them  a  glorious  and  profita 
ble  career.  If  any  of  you  have  the  Chicago  Republican 
or  Chicago  Journal  of  to-day,  you  will  find  in  the  course 
of  an  address  I  delivered  at  Springfield,  extracts  with 
which  I  do  not  care  to  detain  you  now,  proving  most  irre 
futably  from  the  highest  Southern  authorities,  that  in 
order  that  she  might  have  the  monopoly  of  the  supply  of 
cotton,  and  England  the  monopoly  of  manufacturing  it, 
the  South  insisted  on  such  congressional  action  as  would 
forever  prevent  the  development  of  the  vast  and  infinitely 
varied  resources  of  the  West.  I  take  the  liberty  of  in 
viting  your  attention  to  those  extracts,  and  ask  you  to 
consider  them  as  part  of  this  address.*  These  shackles 
have  been  stricken  off.  The  powers  that  ruled  us  were 
the  monopoly  that  has  made  a  hell  of  Ireland,  and  of 
I  ndia !  The  monopoly  that  so  long  as  we  were  colonial,  pro 
hibited  the  establishment  of  a  rolling-mill,  a  slitting-mill 
or  iron-works  in  our  country  I  The  monopoly  that  has 
reduced  a  million  of  English  workmen  to  pauperism,  and 
swelled  the  poor-tax  of  Scotland  from  one  dollar  to  $4.50 
during  the  brief  reign  of  Victoria.  For  every  dollar  paid 
to  maintain  the  poor  of  Scotland  in  the  last  year  of  the 
reign  of  William  IV.,  $4.50  was  required  in  1865.  The 
manufacturing  power  of  England  was  one  conspiring 
monopoly,  and  the  other  was  that  which  sold  men,  women, 
and  children  on  the  auction  block  throughout  the  South. 
These  two  monopolies  were  co-conspirators  against  the 
people  of  the  West,  and  I  refer  you  to  the  authorities,  as 
you  will  find  them  in  the  Republican  and  Journal  of  to 
day.  That  powerful  combination  fell  with  slavery,  and 
the  day  dawns  when  the  West  shall  be  more  crowded  with 
immigrants  than  ever  before,  and  when  in  parts  of  every 
State  there  will  be  a  market  near  the  farmer's  door  for  his 
productions.  You  will  not  then  fear  to  raise  too  much. 
1  propose  to  show  you  how  to  increase  your  power,  to 
raise  more  wheat  than  you  have  ever  raised  on  your  vir 
gin  soil,  and  feed  more  cattle  per  acre  than  ever  fed  before 
upon  your  broad  prairies  and  rolling  lands,  while  creating 
a  market  for  it  all. 

And  now  is  the  time  for  this  great  work.     England  is 
in  her  decadence !     Nay,  she  is  in  a  rapid  decline,  what 


*  See  extracts  from     Cotton  is  King. 

13 


194:  AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND    FINANCE. 

doctors  would  call  the  "galloping  consumption."* 
[Laughter.]  I  speak  advisedly,  and  I  have  yet  to  give 
you  some  facts  by  which  to  sustain  my  conclusions.  She 
is  a  wonderful  nation,  and  her  story  shows,  as  does  our 
own  last  six  years  of  history,  that  the  hand  of  Providence 
is  ever  guiding  the  affairs  of  nations  by  immutable  laws 
She  has  taught  the  world  what  may  be  done  by  legislative 
protection  to  labor.  Look  at  her — a  little  speck  in  yonder 
ocean  !  Not  so  large  as  Wisconsin — not  so  large  as  Penn 
sylvania,  and  yet  she  has  been  the  mistress  of  the  seas, 
and  her  morning  drum,  even  to  this  day,  may  be  heard  at 
any  hour  encircling  the  world.  She  achieved  her  preemi 
nence  by  a  well-devised  system  of  protection,  by  which  she 
employed  all  her  own  people  on  her  own  soil  and  mate 
rials.  She  protected  the  laborers  engaged  in  working  the 
coal,  iron,  copper,  tin,  and  whatever  lay  in  the  mines,  or 
could  be  dug  from  the  hills,  or  be  grown  upon  the  soil  of 
England.  She  gave  employment  to  all  her  people,  and 
stimulated  their  industry  and  energy  in  developing  her  re 
sources.  She  used  to  be  laughed  at  by  the  Dutch — when 


*  We  are  told  that  our  manufacturing  industries,  far  from  being  ruined,  are 
prosperous.  It  is  true  they  are  not  yet  ruined,  but  many  are  more  depressed 
than  they  have  ever  before  been.  Very  rnanj'  of  them  are  sick — very  sick;  far 
more  so  than  those  unacquainted  with  them  have  any  idea  of,  and  a  few  years 
more  of  such  depression  will  see  many  of  them  in  extremis.  There  are  many 
who  argue  that  our  manufacturers  would  at  once  give  up  manufacturing  if  it  did 
not  pay  ;  and  no  doubt  it  is  a  very  natural  assumption,  that  if  a  manufacturer 
continues  his  business  it  is  a  proof  he  is  making  money  by  it;  but  it  is 
very  often  the  case  that  he  continues  to  manufacture  only  because  he  cannot 
afford  to  stop.  They  little  know  how  many  manufacturers  continue  to  struggle 
on  in  business  merely  because  they  do  not  know  how  to  get  out  of  it.  A  man 
with  twenty,  thirty,  fifty,  or  a  hundred  thousand  pounds  sunk  in  works  and  ma 
chinery  cannot  give  up  business  without  ruin.  The  causes  that  diminish  the 
demand  for  his  produce  diminish  also  the  value  of  his  plant;  his  capital  and  in 
terest  are  imperilled  at  the  same  time  and  by  the  same  cause.  It  is  not  to  be 
expected,  it  is  not  in  the  nature  of  Englishmen,  that  he  should  at  once  throw  up 
the  sponge,  and  declare  himself  beat;  he  will  continue  to  tread  the  mill  though 
he  gets  nothing  for  it ;  he  will  struggle  on  for  years,  losing  steadily,  perhaps, 
but  yet  hopeful  of  a  change.  Millions  of  manufacturing  capital  are  in  that  con 
dition  in  England  at  present.  Capitalists  continue  to  employ  their  capital  in 
manufacturing  industries  because  it  is  already  invested  in  them ;  but  in  many 
cases  it  is  earning  no  profit,  and  in  others  diminishing  year  by  year. 

It  takes  some  time  to  scatter  the  wealth  of  England.  The  growth  of  half  a 
century  of  industrial  success  is  not  kicked  over  in  a  day.  Moreover,  it  is  only 
now,  only  within  the  last  three  years,  that  the  foreign  producers  have  acquired 
the  skill  and  capital  and  machinery  that  enables  them  really  to  press  us  out  of 
our  own  markets.  The  shadow  has  been  coming  over  us  for  many  years,  but  it 
is  only  just  now  we  are  beginning  to  feel  the  substance;  their  progress  corres 
ponds  with  our  decline.  A  great  manufacturing  nation  like  England  does  not 
suddenly  collapse  and  give  place  to  another;  her  industries  are  slowly,  bit  by 
bit,  replaced  by  those  of  other  countries ;  the  process  is  gradual,  and  we  are 
undergoing  it  at  present.  The  difference  between  England  and  her  young  manu- 


AMERICAN    INDUSTRY    AND    FINANCE.  195 

Van  Trump,  the  representative  of  little  Holland,  then  the 
mistress  of  the  sea,  carried  his  broom  at  the  masthead— 
for  selling  raw  materials  and  buying  manufactured  goods. 
The  Dutch  said,  "  England  sold  her  skins  for  sixpence, 
and  bought  back  the  tail — dressed — for  a  shilling.17 
[Laughter.]  But  she  got  over  that.  She  welcomed 
industrious  emigrants  from  every  land.  If  they  intro 
duced  a  new  industry,  she  gave,  by  special  order  or  legis 
lation,  protection  to  that  industry  until  it  should  take  firm 
hold  on  English  soil.  She  legislated  in  favor  of  her  own 
ships.  The  foreign  article  brought  in  English  bottom 
came  into  her  ports  under  differential  duties  lower  than 
those  on  the  same  article  coming  in  on  the  same  day  in 
foreign  bottoms.  She  thus  stimulated  the  building  of 
English  ships,  and  created  a  great  English  Navy,  and  had 
she  protected  her  colonies  as  she  did  the  people  of  Eng 
land,  would  have  been  the  great  benefactor  of  the  world. 
But  when  she  gained  a  colony,  she  looked  only  for  the 
raw  material  she  could  get  from  it,  and  the  manufactured 
articles  she  could  sell  its  people.  Her  policy  was  to  ex- 


faeturing  rivals  is  simple,  but  alarming.  France,  Austria,  Prussia,  Belgium, 
Switzerland,  have  increased  their  export  trade  and  their  home  consumption  ; 
England  has  increased  her  export  trade,  but  her  home  consumption  has  fallen 
away,  in  the  matter  of  cotton  alone,  35  per  cent,  in  three  years ! 

In  the  present  condition  of  manufacturing  industries  it  is  foolish  to  tell  the 
operative  class  to  attribute  the  prosperity  to  Free  Trade;  they  are  not  prosper 
ous;  it  is  a  mockery  to  tell  them  to  thank  God  for  a  full  stomach,  when  they  are 
empty!  they  are  not  well  off;  never  has  starvation,  pauperism,  crime,  discon 
tent,  been  so  plentiful  in  the  manufacturing  districts — never  since  England  has 
been  a  manufacturing  country  has  every  industry  great  or  small  been  so  com 
pletely  depressed,  never  has  work  been  so  impossible  to  find,  never  have  the 
means  and  savings  of  the  working  classes  been  at  so  low  an  ebb. 

We  hare  had  periods  when  some  two  or  three  of  the  great  industries  were  de 
pressed,  but  health  still  remained  in  a  number  of  small  ones:  now  the  depres 
sion  is  universal;  the  only  industry  in  the  country  that  is  really  flourishing  is 
that  of  the  machine  makers,  turning  out  spinning  and  weaving  machinery  fur 
foreign  countries !  many  of  these  works  are  going  night  and  day. 

Now  many  persons  doubt  this  distress,  deny  it  altogether,  and  appeal  to  the 
Board  of  Trade  returns  and  to  the  dicta  of  certain  retired  manufacturers,  who, 
having  invested  the  wealth  acquired  in  former  years,  and  being  released  from 
the  anxieties  and  dangers  of  declining  trade,  can  now,  without  danger,  afford  to 
indulge  their  commercial  theories  without  injuring  their  pockets. 

The  manufacturing  districts  are  depressed  as  they  never  have  been  before,  and 
any  one  who  will  visit  them  may  see  by  evidence  that  cannot  lie,  by  smokeless 
chimneys,  by  closed  shops,  by  crowded  poorhouses  and  glutted  jails,  by  crowds 
of  squalid  idlers,  that  the  distress  is  real.  Take  the  one  simple  fact  that  the  con 
sumption  of  cotton  goods  in  England  has  fallen  off  35  per  cent,  in  three  years! 
Can  any  fact  afford  stronger  proof  of  the  poverty  and  depression  of  our  opera 
tive  classes?  Cotton  constitutes  the  greater  proportion  of  the  clothing  of  the 
lower  orders;  when,  therefore,  the  consumption  of  cotton  falls  away  it  is  proof 
positive  that  the  working  classes  are  taking  less  clothing. — Sullivan'g  Protection 
to  Native  Industry.  London,  1870.  Am.  Ed.,  p.  17. 


193  AMERICAN    INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE. 

port  products  as  much  manufactured  as  possible, -and  im 
port  the  products  of  other  nations  as  little  manufactured 
as  possible,  so  as  to  stimulate  her  own  industries.  We 
have  been  told  that  if  we  did  not  buy  her  manufactures 
she  would  not  buy  our  grain  ;  yet  from  Prussia  and  Rus 
sia  each,  the  most  protected  nations  on  the  continent  except 
Belgium,  she  gets  eight  times  as  much  grain  as  she  does 
from  us.  From  France,  the  next  highest  protected  coun 
try,  she  gets  largely  more  than  she  does  from  us,  and 
Mecklenburg  and  Turkey  each  furnish  her  more  than  we 
do.  Her  policy  is  to  buy  cheap  and  sell  dear !  She  buys 
little  of  America,  for  she  can  get  goods  cheaper  from 
countries  whose  wages  are  lower ;  but  she  sells  more  to 
America  than  any  other  country,  for  she  finds  the  people 
tools  enough  to  buy  whatever  is  dear,  rather  than  make  it 
for  fear  of  creating  a  monopoly.  [Laughter.]  So,  she 
has  illustrated  the  wisdom  of  setting  the  people  of  a  State 
or  country  at  work  upon  the  productions  of  their  own 
soil ;  giving  employment  to  every  person,  at  all  seasons 
of  the  year,  bringing  the  producers  and  consumers  side 
by  side,  and  getting  manufactured  articles  without  great 
cost  of  transportation. 

But  she  has  recently  given  a  new  illustration  of  the  law 
by  which  the  power  of  nations  is  developed.  She  found 
herself  short  of  food,  and  Cobden  and  other  noble  men 
engaged  in  the  work  of  giving  the  working  people  cheap 
food.  But  they  carried  their  theories  too  far.  They 
opened  their  markets  for  manufactured  goods  to  competi 
tion  with  the  world.  The  wise  legislation  that  had  made 
her  the  most  powerful  nation  of  the  world  was  repealed. 
What  is  the  result?  A  little  over  twenty  years  has 
elapsed,  and  England  is  "  sick  unto  death,"  and  can  never 
recover  without  going  through  the  process  of  a  revolu 
tion.*  I  have  told  you  that  her  export  of  cotton  goods 

*  The  small  farmer  gives  wny  to  the  mere  ploughman;  and  capitalists,  few  in 
number,  command  the  soil.  This  gives  rise  to  a  very  remarkable  state  of  things. 
The  Irish  farmers,  with  their  families,  are  driven  off  from  their  farms,  and 
oome  over  to  Scotland  in  shoals  to  press  their  labor  on  our  capitalist  farmers. 
They  are  fast  taking  the  place  of  the  Scotch  peasantry,  while  these  are  driven  into 
the  towns,  or  altogether  off  the  country.  Ag;iin,  our  Scotchmen  are  crowding 
in  upon  English  labor  and  competing  with  that,  both  in  the  country  and  in  the 
towns.  The  Irish  are  cheaper  than  the  Scotch,  and  the  Scotch  are  cheaper  than 
the  English;  and  without  knowing  why,  the  working  masses  are  being  shoved 
off  in  thousands  to  save  them  from  death. — Social  Politics,  Kirk. 

These  things  must  be  laid  to  heart,  for  (as  we  have  said  more  than  once) 
emigration  cannot  help  us  out  of  the  difficulty  which  these  bring,  and  must  keep 


AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE.  197 

had  fallen  off  five  millions  of  dollars  last  year ;  that  her 
exportation  of  English  manufactured  silk  goods  fell  off 
one  million  of  dollars.  She  exported  comparatively  little 
British-made  paper.  Her  "  free  trade  "  is  uprooting  her 
feebler  industries  and  converting  her  skilled  workmen 
into  paupers.  Seventeen  silk  manufactories  made  the 
town  of  Macclesfield  prosperous  when  that  treaty  was 
signed.  Of  those  seventeen  but  one  exists,  and  it  is 
working  up  its  raw  material,  and  the  proprietor  is  buying 
no  more.  The  English  silk  maker  cannot  compete  witli 
the  low  wages  of  France,  and  the  still  lower  wages  of 
Belgium.  The  paper  trade  was  next  attacked.  It  was 
one  of  the  few  industries  left  to  Ireland,  and  it  has  been 
extirpated,  and  in  the  tables  of  the  exports  of  Great 
Britain  for  last  year  you  will  find  the  bulk  of  her  exports 
were  of  Belgian  paper.  Her  books  are  printed  in  Bel 
gium.  I  bought  to-day  in  Mr.  Strickland's  store,  a  book 
to  carry  home  to  my  little  child — it  bears  the  imprint  of  a 
London  house — the  paper  in  it  is  Belgian,  the  printing  is 
Belgian,  and  the  binding  is  Belgian.  And  what  a  sad 
story  is  connected  with  this  change  in  her  trade.  I  refer 
you  to  the  files  of  your  own  paper  for  three  weeks,  for  I 
have  read  it  everywhere  as  I  travelled,  that  five  thousand 
compositors,  the  most  skilled  in  England,  are  out  of  em 
ployment  and  going  upon  the  poor  rates.  The  London 
News  describes  it  as  a  pitiable  scene ;  those  skilled  and 
intelligent  workmen  gathering  daily  at  the  Trade  Kooms 
to  the  number  of  three  hundred,  and  remaining  there  all 
day  in  the  hope  that  some  of  them  may  be  called  to  fill 
the  place  of  a  sick  or  absent  workman.  And  the  News 
remarks  that  it  is  painful  to  record  that  such  calls  do  not 
average  two  a  day.  During  last  winter,  the  same  paper 


upon  us  so  long  as  the  present  system  goes  on.  The  cause  must  be  arrested,  or 
the  effect  will  continue  to  grow  upon  us.  As  we  shall  more  fully  show,  when  we 
come  properly  to  the  point,  the  men  who  emigrate  are  the  very  hands  by  who,se 
industry  we  have  been  kept  so  long  from  the  state  of  collapse,  which  has  at 
length  come.  The  men  and  women  they  leave  behind  are  the  comparatively 
helpless,  whose  energy  is  not  even  sufficient  to  stave  off  pauperism  from  them 
selves,  and  who  cannot  possibly  wage  a  successful  war  with  a  system  which 
drains  off  every  possible  penny,  and  thing,  to  be  devoured  in  luxury. — Ibid. 

Men  who  can  make  and  unmake  the  legislature  will  not  die  in  favor  of  deer, 
merely  because  it  so  happens  that  a  selfish  hand  has  the  landholder's  hold  of  the 
soil  by  technical  right.  The  people  of  this  country  need  not,  and  we  think  they 
will  not,  resort  to  any  other  means  by  which  to  redistribute  the  surface  so  that 
all  shall  have  space  enough  on  which  to  live,  than  such  as  will  inevitably  follow 
the  suppression  of  unfair  modes  of  dealing  between  class  and  class  in  the  com 
munity. — Ibid. 


198  AMERICAN  INDUSTRY  AND   FINANCE. 

states  that  five  thousand  of  the  best  shipbuilders  in  Eng 
land,  too  proud  to  receive  charity,  went  to  breaking  stones 
in  default  of  other  employment.  One  after  another  of  the 
more  feeble  industries  are  going;  and  at  last  England,  the 
land  of  coal  and  limestone  and  iron,  finds  herself  crowded 
out  of  foreign  markets  and  will  be  crowded  out  of  her 
own,  even  in  the  iron  trade.  So  frightened  have  the 
governing  English  people  begun  to  feel,  that  the  iron 
masters  selected  two  men  of  great  ability,  II.  Herries 
Creed  and  Walter  Williams,  Jr.,  to  travel  on  the  continent 
and  inquire  into  the  cause  of  the  diminution  of  the  Eng 
lish  iron  trade.  They  returned  and  published  a  book 
called  "  Handicraftsmen  and  Capitalists,"  and  I  purpose 
to  detain  you  briefly  by  reading  an  extract  from  this 
remarkable  work : 

"  We  are  in  presence  of  a  real  danger  while  these  people  are  look 
ing  at  one  of  which  there  is  only  a  shadow,  and  that,  as  we  believe, 
a  shadow  created  hy  imagination,  and  riot  that  of  an  existence. 
We  are  face  to  face  now,  at  this  moment,  with  the  greatest  obstruc 
tion  that  British  industry  has  ever  been  checked  by,  and  unless  we 
can  remove  it,  and  remove  it  promptly,  the  supremacy  which  we 
have  held  in  production  and  manufacture  will  be  transferred  to 
wiser  and  harder  working  nations.  The  civil  war  of  America  and 
the  political  condition  of  Germany  have  stayed  the  progress  of  those 
countries,  and  have  checked  the  advancing  foot  that  was  treading  on 
our  heels.  We  have  again  widened  the  before  narrowing  distance 
between  us,  and  we  again  hold  our  own  in  the  production  of  textile 
fabrics  and  many  other  industries.  But  in  the  meantime  Belgium, 
which  has  enjoyed  even  to  a  greater  extent  than  ourselves  the 
advantage  of  being  a  neutral  Power,  and  France,  whose  great 
hoarded  wealth  arid  hitherto  insufficiently  appreciated  powers  of 
production  have  been  receiving  rapid  as  well  as  continuous  develop 
ment  from  the  application  of  the  wonderful  administrative  ability 
of  her  Emperor,  have  been  steadily  overhauling  us  at  a  pace  increas 
ing  daily.  And  they  have  been  doing  this  most  remarkably  in  the 
very  industry  in  which,  above  all  others,  we  ought  to  have  been 
able  to  set  competition  at  defiance.  In  cotton  we  were  dependent 
upon  another  nation  for  the  raw  material.  In  the  case  of  iron  every 
description  of  raw  material  required  in  aid  of  its  manufacture  is  the 
produce  of  our  own  soil.  It  is  under  our  feet ;  and  yet,  with  all  this 
advantage — with  the  additional  advantage,  too,  as  we  are  told,  of 
possessing  the  best  and  most  advanced  skilled  workmen  in  the 
world — Belgium  and  France  have  been  thrusting  us  out  of  foreign 
markets  to  an  extent  which  the  public  will  hardly  credit,  and  of 
which  the  trade  itself  is  scarcely  aware.  ..... 

"  A  like  state  of  things  obtains  in  Spain.  There,  again,  England 
is  thrust  aside,  defeated  by  Belgium  and  by  France.  We  cannot 
compete  with  their  producers  either  in  price  or  continuousness  and 
certainty  of  supply.  Nor  is  this  all.  Even  at  home,  even  within 
our  own  boundaries,  these  industrious  and  pushing  people  are 


AMERICAN    INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE.  199 

challenging  our  supremacy,  and  that  not  infrequently  with  success. 
In  bar  iron,  in  rails,  in  engines  for  agricultural  purposes,  and  even 
in  locomotives  for  railways,  they  have  lately  been  obtaining  orders 
even  in  our  own  market  here  at  home. 

How  and  why  is  this  ?  How  is  it  that  our  position  in  so  great  an 
industry  has  been  slipping  from  under  us  ?  It  is  a  question  of  grave 
import,  and  these  are  facts  calculated  to  create  great  anxiety,  not 
only  to  the  capital  which  embraces  in  its  operations  eighteen  Eng 
lish  counties,  besides  the  Scotch,  Welsh,  and  Irish  districts,  but  to 
a  large  population  of  special  habits  and  industrial  skill,  dependent 
upon  the  maintenances  of  our  mines  and  our  ironworks  in  full 
activity  and  progressive  development.  To  these  latter  the  question 
we  have  asked  is  of  far  greater  moment  than  it  is  or  can  be  to 
either  the  state  or  the  capitalist.  The  State  may  lose,  and  yet  exist, 
and  carry  on  with  loss  more  or  less ;  the  capitalist  may  be  com 
pelled  to  make  a  sacrifice  in  converting  his  fixed  capital  into  mov 
able,  but  he  can  carry  that  diminished  capital  and  his  undiminished 
reputation  and  administrative  ability  to  Belgium,  to  France,  to 
Spain,  or  to  Russian  Poland.  There,  in  any  and  all  of  those  coun 
tries,  he  will  find  great  coal  fields  of  excellent  yield,  upon  or  near 
which  lie  can  establish  iron  works,  where,  with  the  appliances  that 
his  capital  can  command,  and  his  administrative  experience  manage, 
he  will,  with  the  aid  of  native  labor,  cheerfully  furnished  at  a  com 
paratively  nominal  rate,  far  outstrip  the  hampered  efforts  of  his 
country,  seize  for  himself  that  profit  of  which  a  large  proportion 
would  have  been  public  property,  and  leave  the  discontented  and 
combative  artisans  of  England  a  burden  to  their  country  and  a  diffi 
culty  to  themselves.  To  the  artisan  of  Great  Britain,  to  the 
unionists  of  her  manufacturing  districts,  this  question  is  of  the 
extremest  importance.  Their  life  or  death  hangs  upon  its  prompt 
solution.  Transfer  of  themselves  is  simply  an  impossiblity.  For 
eign  nations  have  a  superabundance  of  labor  with  which,  untram 
melled  as  they  are  by  legislative  restrictions,  they  can,  with  the  aid 
of  the  improved  processes  obtained  by  them  from  us,  proceed  independ 
ently  arid  triumphantly  in  the  path  upon  which  they  have  entered  so 
promisingly,  and  which,  unless  we  can  cross  it,  must  conduct  them 
to  monopoly." 

Sagacious  Englishmen  are  discovering  that  free  trade  is 
not  likely  to  prove  so  pleasant  to  England  as  they  thought 
it  would.*  There  are  thirty  Prussian  locomotives  running 

*  Whoever  contemplates,  on  the  one  hand,  the  enormous  powers  of  production 
in  the  United  Kingdom,  and  on  the  other,  the  misery  which  nevertheless  grinds 
down  masses  of  the  population,  will  necessarily  conclude  that  the  circumstances 
which  ensure  or  promote  the  creation  and  due  distribution  of  wealth,  are  yet 
•unknown  or  mistaken.  He  will  see  the  science  which  assumes  to  teach  these 
things,  discredited,  helpless,  and  utterly  at  fault.  There  must  be  something 
fearfully  wrong  or  essentially  deficient  in  the  prevailing  system  :  there  must 
necessarily  be  some  error  in  theory.  No  adequate  practical  measures  of  relief 
can  be  devised  till  it  is  discovered. — Sir  John  Byles,  in  preface  to  9<A  edition  of 
Sophisms  of  Free  Trade.  Manchester,  1870. 

The  claptrap  of  leaving  everything  to  "supply  and  demand"  of  heartless 
Political  Economy  (so  called,  but  not  the  true  thing)  has  had  its  day.  The  first 
want  of  mankind  is  the  means  of  subsistence;  but  what  does  this  "law"  of 
supply  and  demand  do  here?  What  is  at  present  reckoned  the  correct  view  of 


200  AMERICAN    INDUSTRY    AND    FINANCE. 

over  the  Northwestern  Railroad  of  Great  Britain.  Eng 
lish  goods  are  too  dear  for  Englishmen,  but  we  buy  them, 
and  pay  the  cost  of  transportation  from  Manchester  to 
the  seacoast,  across  the  Atlantic  to  New  York,  and  thence 
to  our  Western  frontiers.  We  could  do  a  great  deal 
better  than  that  if  we  would  do  as  France  and  Belgium 
and  Prussia  do — set  our  own  people  to  work  upon  our 
own  vast  and  varied  materials.  You  have  iron  in  grand 
abundance.  You  have  peat  as  cheap  as  coal  to  make  it. 
You  have  the  coal  of  Illinois  and  Iowa  lying  near  to  the 
respective  boundaries  of  your  State.  You  have  copper, 
zinc,  lead — all  that  you  want  is  energy  and  enterprise, 
and  determination  to  see  to  it,  that  your  representatives 
will  look  to  your  interests,  and  you  can  build  American 
rolling-mills,  such  as  I  examined  this  afternoon  at  Bay- 
view,  in  every  section  of  your  State.  You  can  go  to 
England,  and  lift  out  of  want  and  pauperism  the  skilled 
workmen  of  that  country  who  are  hungering  in  poverty, 
and  who  would  thank  you  to  the  latest  day  of  their  lives 
for  making  them  independent  workingmen,  and  free 
American  citizens.  [Applause.]  Among  the  disastrous 
effects  of  free  trade  on  the  interests  of  the  working  people 
of  England  last  year,  it  is  reported  by  Sir  Roderick  Mur- 
chison,  that  in  Cornwall  and  Devonshire  three  hundred 
copper  and  tin  mines  were  closed.  Three  hundred  mines 
closed  in  order  that  70,000  tons  of  cheap  ore  might  be 
imported  from  Chili  and  other  South  American  States. 
What  effect  had  the  closing  of  these  mines  on  the  miners 


State  economy?  Is  it  to  provide  work  for  the  poor,  the  honest,  and  the  will 
ing?  Not  at  all.  That  is  not  the  Political  Economy  (falsely  so  called)  which 
is  the  idolatry  of  English  politicians.  It  is  for  the  state  to  stand  aloof  when 
widespread  distress  prevails,  and  to  give  no  help  until  the  unemployed  have 
sunk  to  the  rank  of  paupers,  when  they  are  handed  over  to  the  humiliation  and 
demoralization  of  the  Poorhouse,  and  the  tender  mercies  of  the  local  bodies  so 
frequently  misnamed  "guardians." — The  State,  the  Poor,  and  the  Country.  By 
R.  H.  Patterson.  Edinburgh  and  London,  1870. 

The  weak  point  of  Political  Economy  has  hitherto  been  that,  by  many  of  its 
teachers,  the  financial  test  has  in  all  cases  been  made  absolute.  The  immediate 
production  of  wealth  has  frequently  been  made  the  sole  object  of  the  science: 
overlooking  the  fact,  not  only  that  the  amount  of  wealth  in  a  community  is  far 
from  being  an  absolute  test  of  national  well-being,  but  also  that  many  an  ex 
penditure  upon  the  improvement  of  the  moral  and  intellectual  condition  of  the 
people,  howsoever  unproductive  in  the  first  instance,  or  it  may  be  for  many 
years,  transmutes  itself  into  a  positive  financial  gain  in  the  end,  besides  from 
the  first  conducing  to  the  increased  contentment  and  good  order  of  the  commun 
ity.—  Ibid. 

But  such  Political  Economy  is  not  only  heartless,  but  eminently  short-sighted. 
It  disregards  two  grand  elements  of  the  question, — the  clement  of  the  future,  and 
also  the  question  of  social  well-being. — Ibid. 


AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND    FINANCE.  201 

whose  only  estate  was  their  skill  and  industry  ?  But 
seven  thousand  of  them  were  able  to  emigrate,  for  English 
wages  do  not  enable  the  miner  to  own  a  home,  or  lay  up 
money  by  which  to  carry  a  family  to  a  distant  country  ; 
and  there  are  more  than  seven  thousand,  yes,  three  times 
seven  thousand  of  them  reduced  to  want,  and  swelling  the 
list  of  paupers,  who  now  number  more  than  a  million  in 
England  alone.  I  will  not  talk  of  Ireland,  and  have 
already  alluded  to  Scotland  in  this  connection.  But  on  the 
last  day  of  last  March  there  were  dependent  on  the  poor 
rates  of  England  993,000  people — one  out  of  every  fourteen, 
and  the  number  is  steadily  increasing.  Bring  these  poor 
people  here,  pay  their  passage,  and  let  them  dig  into  your 
iron  beds,  and  your  limestone,  and  your  peat  beds.  Let 
them  work  your  copper,  zinc,  and  lead  mines,  and  you 
will  find  that  your  State  will  increase  in  power,  and  popu 
lation,  and  wealth,  and  that  your  markets  will  not  depend 
on  long  lines  of  transportation.  This  will  be  doing  a 
work  of  humanity.  It  will  be  doing  God's  work — taking 
care  of  His  poor.  Yes,  it  will  be  robbing  the  tyrant  of 
the  world  of  the  power  to  ever  again  interfere  in  our 
family  quarrels  and  destroy  our  commerce.  [Applause.] 
I  find  at  Bayview  a  beautiful  rolling-mill  not  yet  com 
pleted.  It  has  I  am  told  already  added  about  1000  to 
the  inhabitants  of  Milwaukee.  If  it  be  extended  and  the 
wages  of  those  who  are  to  work  in  it  be  protected  by  an 
adequate  tariff,  there  will  be  furnaces  and  forges  added  to 
it,  and  apparatus  for  digging  peat,  pressing  and  con 
suming  it.  There  will  be  commerce  landing  at  your 
broad  new  pier.  It  will  be  crowded  with  iron  from  the 
Marquette  region  and  coal  from  Pennsylvania,  Iowa,  and 
Illinois.  Vessels  will  be  going  there,  taking  old  rails  to 
be  re-rolled,  and  carrying  away  rails  that  have  been  made, 
or  rolled;  and  I  predict  that  under  the  energy  that  pre 
sides  over  this  new  industry,  Bayview  will  in  five  years 
be  one  of  the  greatest  commercial  points  of  Milwaukee. 
If  you  do  not  crush  out  the  enterprise,  in  order  that 
England  can  enjoy  your  markets,  this  point  will  grow 
in  population  to  five  or  ten,  probably  fifteen  or  twenty 
thousand  people  during  the  next  decade.  Depend  upon 
it,  this  one  industry  will  gather  around  it  laboring 
people,  skilled  mechanics,  iron  workers,  machine  makers, 
and  the  merchant,  the  teacher,  the  physician,  the 
preacher,  and  all  the  elements  that  you  find  in  a  pros- 


202  AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE. 

perous  village.*  This  is  the  way  we  have  changed  Phila 
delphia  from  a  sprawling  city  of  one  hundred  and  twenty 
thousand  when  I  first  knew  it,  to  a  city  of  seven  hundred 
thousand  inhabitants.  We  have  gone  into  all  lands, 
gathered  skilled  workmen,  however  poor,  and  put  them  at 
work  upon  our  soil  or  mineral  productions.  There  are 
establishments  in  my  district,  employing  2500  hands, 
almost  every  one  a  head  of  a  family,  with  which  he  lives  in 
a  home  that  he  owns,  and  calls  no  man  lord  on  this  earth ! 
[Applause.]  But,  citizens  of  Wisconsin,  I  have  not  come 
to  you  to-night  to  plead  for  the  iron  interests  of  Pennsyl 
vania,  nor  for  the  manufacturers  of  the  East,  but  to  plead 
with  you — with  your  cheaper  food  and  more  abundant 
resources — to  enrich  yourselves  by  rivalling  them  in  gain 
ing  the  profits  which  are  derived  from  any  branch  of 

*  How  fully  my  predictions  have  been  anticipated  is  shown  by  the  following 
letter,  which,  though  not  intended  for  publication,  I  cannot  withhold: 
OFFICE  OP  THE  MILWAUKEE  IRON  COMPANY, 

MILWAUKEE,  Feb.  2lst,  1871. 
HON.  WM.  D.  KELLEY, 

Dear  Sir : — I  just  happened  to  think  that  you  visited  our  city  in  1867  shortly 
before  our  mill  for  re-rolling  went  into  operation.  That  was  the  beginning  of 
the  iron  industry  of  this  State.  I  recollect  that  you  prophesied  things  concern 
ing  the  future  business  of  our  company,  which  seemed  almost  fabulous  even  to 
me.  I  am  writing  this,  merely  to  tell  you  how  near  you  came  to  the  truth,  as  I 
know  you  are  interested  in  these  things. 

In  1868  we  made  8000  tons  of  rails  and  employed  150  men.  The  business 
then  was  confined  to  re-rolling.  In  1870  we  made  over  16,000  tons  of  rails. 
This  month  we  started  a  new  puddling  mill,  which  more  than  doubles  our 
puddling  capacity.  The  capacity  of  the  works  is  now  30,000  tons  of  rails  per 
annum,  and  that  quantity  we  hope  to  make  in  1871.  We  started  our  No.  1 
Blast  Furnace  iu  April,  1870.  No.  2  Furnace  will  start  in  about  a  month. 
These  furnaces  are  second  to  none  on  the  continent  of  America,  and  can  easily 
make  30,000  tons  of  pig  iron  per  annum.  We  have  an  inexhaustible  supply  of 
the  finest  ore  within  fifty  miles  of  us,  from  which  we  draw  most  of  our  material. 
We  use  also  Lake  Superior  ore.  We  now  employ  700  men  in  our  works.  The 
works  have  already  far  outgrown  your  prophecy,  and  there  is  every  reason  to 
believe  that  they  are  yet  in  their  infancy.  Bessemer  steel  works  are  now  con 
templated,  and  will  doubtless  be  built. 

The  iron  interest  of  the  West  is  rapidly  growing  in  importance.  As  these 
manufacturing  centres  grow,  people  who  have  heretofore  been  blind  on  the 
subject  are  beginning  to  see  that  Protection  means  something.  The  land  on 
which  our  works  stand,  was  bought  in  1866  for  $100  per  acre.  A  large  and 
thriving  village  has  grown  up,  and  land  within  a  radius  of  half  a  mile  of  our 
works  now  sells  for  §1000  per  acre.  Fully  nine-tenths  of  our  men  are  from 
Europe,  many  of  them  brought  here  directly  by  us,  and  because  these  works  were 
built.  This  iron  interest  so  rapidly  developing  has  changed  the  sentiments  of 
the  people  of  this  city.  You  would  have  a  larger  audience  now,  could  you  again 
talk  to  them  of  Protection.  I  hope  the  time  will  soon  come,  when  we  may  see 
you  here;  we  of  the  West  believe  there  is  to  be  a  fiyht  on  this  subject.  You 
who  are  known  as  the  champion  of  the  cause  must  come  to  us.  You  will  not  be 
told  that  "you  are  working  only  for  the  Pennsylvania  iron  interest."  That 
interest  is  now  a  national  one. 

Yours  very  respectfully, 

JAS.  J.  HAGERMAN. 


AMERICAN   INDUSTRY  AND   FINANCE.  203 

business  in  which  they  engage,  and  thus  establish  a  sure 
market  for  the  provisions  you  will  still  grow,  but  which 
your  former  customers  no  longer  require. 

More  specially  than  this,  my  fellow-citizens,  I  come  to 
•urge  you  to  engage  in  another  branch  of  agriculture.  I 
saw,  as  I  travelled  through  the  South,  not  only  that  it 
was  growing  grain,  and  raising  pork  and  beef,  but  that  it 
was  raising  but  little  sugar ;  that  it  was  soon  to  look  to 
the  great  West  for  sugar.  Wisconsin  will  yet  make  sugar 
for  Louisiana. 

As  others  have  done,  you  laugh  at  this  as  a  sensational 
proposition.  Believe  me,  it  is  a  practical  suggestion,  if 
what  can  be  done  in  Sweden,  and  Poland,  and  Russia ;  in 
France,  Austria,  and  Prussia,  can  be  done  in  America. 
Last  year  we  sent  eighty  million  of  dollars  across  the 
Atlantic  for  sugar  and  molasses.  Had  the  people  of  the 
Northwest  listened  to  the  warning  of  Dr.  Schrceder,  of 
Bloomington,  Illinois,  nearly  twelve  years  ago,  who  then 
begged  them  to  engage  in  raising  beets  and  making  sugar, 
every  dollar  of  that  eighty  millions  would  have  remained 
in  the  country.  The  limited  sugar  fields  of  the  South 
cannot*  provide  for  the  constantly  increasing  consumption, 
and  you  can  make  beautiful  sugar  cheaper  in  the  West 
than  the  coarse  sugar  of  Cuba  can  be  produced,  and  can 
thereby  add  to  your  crops  of  wheat,  and  hay,  and  oats, 
and  to  your  capacity  to  raise  sheep  and  cattle.  What  has 
been  the  experience  of  France,  and  all  the  countries  I 
have  named,  would  be  your  experience,  and  is  being  real 
ized  by  certain  enterprising  men  of  Illinois. 

Do  you  know  that  by  devoting  your  land  to  beets  one 
year  out  of  three  you  can  raise  more  grain  or  hay  than 
you  can  by  continuous  crops  of  hay  or  grain  ?  You  can 
if  you  will  grow  the  beet  and  manufacture  sugar.  The 
secret  is  this :  The  beet  requires  deep  ploughing.  It 
must  be  covered  by  the  earth  at  maturity.  If  any  part  of 
it  escapes  from  the  earth  it  is  damaged,  and  the  beet  will 
not  command  a  fair  price,  and  is  only  fit  to  be  fed  to  cat 
tle  ;  therefore  sugar-beet  culture  requires  deep  ploughing. 
It  requires  either  new  land,  like  that  through  which  1 
have  been  travelling  in  the  West,  or  rich  manure.  It 
should  have  manure  for  the  second  year,  at  any  rate ;  but 
in  the  first  year  good  crops  may  be  grown  in  the  fresh 
lands  of  the  prairie.  In  old  land  it  requires  for  its  first 
crop  rich  manure  ;  but  to  get  a  double  crop  of  wheat  the 


204-  AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE. 

next  year  you  will  require  no  manure;  you  have  but  to 
break  the  surface  and  put  in  the  seed.  The  next  year  too 
go  through  the  same  process  of  treating  the  surface  and 
putting  in  your  wheat,  and  your  crop  will  be  double,  or 
nearly  so,  and  in  the  two  years  you  will  have  got  more 
than  by  three  consecutive  crops  with  usual  culture.  In 
the  meanwhile,  you  will  have  sold  your  beets,  and,  at  ordi- 
fnary  prices,  a  larger  profit  will  be  derived  than  if  you  had 
sold  grain,  wheat,  or  hay.  The  beets  are  pressed,  the 
juice  is  taken  for  sugar,  and  the  pulp  which  remains  you 
can  buy  again  as  a  capital  substitute  for  hay.  It  is  the 
custom  in  Europe  that,  when  a  farmer  sells  his  beets,  he 
contracts  to  purchase  back  such  amount  as  he  may  want  of 
the  pulp  to  feed  to  his  cattle  and  sheep •  it  fattens  them 
like  oil  cake. 

Thus  this  industry,  hitherto  neglected  by  Americans, 
furnishes  both  animal  and  vegetable  manures  for  its  own 
promotion,  and  there  is  a  great  increase  in  the  agricultu 
ral  and  cattle  growing  quality  of  the  districts  in  which 
it  is  practised.  One  of  the  arrondissements  of  France, 
in  which,  when  Napoleon  I.  started  beet  culture  by  offering 
a  liberal  system  of  bounties  for  relative  degrees  of  success, 
the  farmers  could  feed  but  700  head  of  cattle,  reported 
11,500  head  of  cattle,  and  better  crops  of  hay  and  all  the 
cereals,  when  Napoleon  III.  and  his  Empress  visited  it,  in 
1865.  The  beet  root  on  the  one  hand,  and  free  trade  in 
England  on  the  other,  have  changed  the  relation  to  animal 
food  of  the  Englishman  and  Frenchman.  The  English 
formerly  called  the  French  Johnny  Crapeau,  "  the  man 
that  lives  on  frogs,"  and  used  to  make  fun  of  his  thin 
broth.  Yet  so  largely  has  the  production  of  cattle  been 
increased  by  beet  culture  in  France  that  she  exports  beef 
and  wheat  to  England,  and  the  proportion  of  Frenchmen 
who  eat  beef  or  mutton  is  steadily  increasing,  while  the 
proportion  of  British  people  who  eat  beef  or  mutton  is 
diminishing.  Enlightened  Frenchmen  ascribe  this  change 
to  the  beet-root  culture.  This  wonderfully  beneficent  in 
dustry  is  the  child  of  protection.  In  1812-13-14,  Napo 
leon  found  the  coast  of  Europe  blockaded.  His  people 
could  get  no  sugar.  The  price  went  up  to  from  93  cents 
to  $1.00  per  pound,  American  money,  and  the  people 
clamored  for  it.  Napoleon  did  not  send  out  vessels  laden 
with  gold  or  bonds  to  run  the  blockade  and  bring  in  sugar, 
but  determined  to  make  France  so  independent  that  they 


AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE.  205 

might  blockade  the  coast  and  Frenchmen  could  still  enjoy 
the  necessaries  of  life.  He  had  read  of  experiments  in 
making  beet-root  sugar.  He  consulted  the  best  chemists, 
and  the  most  experienced  agriculturists  ;  and  satisfied  that 
France  could  produce  her  own  sugar,  he  ordered  100,000 
acres  of  land  to  be  planted  in  beets  at  the  expense  of  the 
Empire.  He  appointed  a  competent  man  to  superintend  it. 
He  also  offered  an  immense  reward  to  the  chemist  or  practi 
cal  mechanic  who  would  extract  most  sugar  from  a  ton  of 
beets,  and  another  to  him  who  should  obtain  the  largest 
amount  of  beets  from  an  acre  of  land.  Then  to  interest 
the  whole  people,  he  offered  two  classes  of  premiums  : 
one  to  those  who  should  raise  not  less  than  a  given  num 
ber  of  tons  of  beets  from  an  acre,  and  the  other  to  those  who 
should  succeed  in  extracting  not  less  than  a  given  amount 
of  sugar  from  a  ton  of  beets.  Thus  he  engaged  the  mind 
and  skill  of  France  in  the  great  experiment  of  supplying 
her  with  sugar.  And  he  attained  his  object.  But,  by  and 
by,  the  blockade  was  lifted,  and  Great  Britain  undertook 
to  destroy  the  new  industry  by  supplying  France  with 
cheap  cane  sugar  from  her  colonies.  Napoleon  said  No  [ 
He  not  only  protected  the  industry  he  had  created  by  high 
duties,  but  for  a  time  prohibited  the  importation  of  sugar, 
that  the  people  who  had  engaged  in  trying  to  supply  him 
and  the  nation  with  the  means  of  subsistence  while  en 
gaged  in  war,  should  be  protected  until  their  industry  was 
fully  established.  When  that  was  done,  the  prohibition 
was  removed,  but  adequate  duties  were  levied  to  protect 
the  trade. 

On  this  point  let  me  read  you  a  brief  extract  from  E. 
B.  Grant's  admirable  work  on  beet- root  sugar  : 

"  The  price  of  beet-root  sugar  in  April,  1866,  was  four  and  three- 
fourth  cents  per  pound. 

"  The  preceding  table  shows  that  the  price  of  sugar  has  con 
stantly  fallen  since  1816.  Yet  production  has  steadily  increased.  It 
will  be  seen  that  the  price  of  sugars,  exclusive  of  duties,  was  in 
1816  about  three  times  greater  than  at  present.  But  this  does  not 
fully  give  an  idea  of  the  difference  in  the  state  of  things  existing 
then  and  now. 

"  From  1816  to  1833  beet  sugars  were  protected  by  a  duty  on  for 
eign  sugars  varying  from  five  to  eight  cents  per  pound. 

"From  1840  to  1860  they  were  protected  by  a  duty  of  from  one 
to  three  arid  a  half  cents  per  pound  on  foreign  sugar. 

"From  1860  to  the  present  time,  not  only  has  there  been  no  pro 
tectiori  as  against  foreign  sugars,  but  sugars  of  the  French  colonies 


206  AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE. 

have  had  an  advantage  over  all  others  of  nearly  half  a  cent  per 
pound. 

"  In  addition  to  constantly  diminishing  price,  with  steadily  decreas 
ing  protection,  wages  have  doubled,  and  it  is  to  increased  skill  alone 
that  the  beet-sugar  manufacture  owes  its  present  existence." 

Yes,  beet-root  sugar  is  the  child  of  protection,  and  I 
beg  you  to  notice  how  munificently  it  is  repaying  those 
who  fostered  it  in  its  hours  of  weakness.  I  have  here 
Grant's  book,  to  which  I  wish  every  one  of  you  in  the  wealthy 
State  of  Wisconsin  had  access.  I  quote  from  it  again : 

"  It  is  the  constant  effort  of  the  French  sugar  manufacturer  at 
the  present  day  to  induce  the  Government  to  reduce  the  duties  and 
imposts  on  sugar,  feeling  that  the  reduction  in  the  price  consequent 
upon  such  action  would  increase  consumption.  He  does  not  ask 
protection  against  the  manufacturers  of  cane  sugar  in  any  part  of 
the  world  ;  for  although  the  industry  is  entirely  the  creation  of  the 
protective  policy,  yet  under  it  so  great  an  amount  of  skill  has  been 
acquired,  arid  the  cost  of  manufacture  has  been  so  reduced,  that  lie 
is  now  able  to  compete  upon  equal  terms  with  the  whole  world. 

"  In  France  the  impost  is  laid  upon  the  sugar  produced ;  in  Bel 
gium  it  was  formerly  laid  upon  the  juice  expressed  from  the  beet, 
but  at  present  it  is  upon  the  sugar,  as  in  France  ;  in  Germany  upon 
the  beets  ;  in  Austria  upon  the  sugar  produced,  or  upon  an  agreed 
estimate  of  the  capacity  of  the  mill ;  in  Russia  upon  the  hydraulic 
presses.  It  varies  in  the  different  countries  from  forty  to  eighty-five 
dollars  per  ton." 

The  Journal  des  Fabricante  de  Sucre,  says  : 

"  But  even  if  the  duties  on  foreign  sugars  should  be  abolished,  the 
advantage  would  be  on  the  side  of  the  beet  sugar  manufacturer,  who 
wjll  probably  have  less  need  of  protection  than  the  Louisiana 
planter. 

"  The  people  of  the  Northern  States  will  not  long  defer  the  culti 
vation  of  a  plant  which  contains  so  much  sugar  that  it  will  soon 
teach  them  to  forget  that  which  was  formerly  produced  upon  the 
banks  of  the  Mississippi.  As  to  the  competition  of  Cuban  and  Bra 
zilian  sugars,  they  have  no  more  cause  to  fear  it  than  have  the  beet 
sugar  makers  of  France  and  Germany,  where  the  economical  condi 
tions  are  far  less  favorable  than  those  of  the  Northern  and  Western 
States. 

"  The  beet-sugar  industry  has  been  of  vast  benefit  to  Europe, 
notwithstanding  the  high  protective  policy  to  which  it  owes  its  ex 
istence,  and  which,  as  a  matter  of  course,  was  pursued  for  a  time  at 
the  expense  of  the  public,  which  paid  higher  for  sugar  than  it  would 
otherwise  have  done  ;  yet  there  is  no  question  that  the  sugars  have 
been  cheaper  throughout  the  world  for  the  past  fifteen  years  than 
they  would  have  been  had  the  industry  not  existed. 

"  Formerly  the  production  of  sugar  was  a  monopoly,  confined  to 
the  tropics,  where  its  possession,  combined  with  the  cheapness  of 
land  and  the  system  of  slavery,  fostered  in  planters  and  manufac 
turers  an  extravagant,  shiftless,  and  costly  method  of  manufac 
ture. 


AMERICAN    INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE  207 

"  The  vast  improvements  that  science  has  brought  to  bear  on  the 
chemistry  and  mechanics  of  beet  sugar  production  in  Europe  have 
awakened  the  planters  arid  manufacturers  of  the  tropics  to  the  neces 
sity  for  progress  if  they  desire  to  retain  their  supremacy. 

"Almost  all  the  improvements  made  in  cane  sugar  manufacture 
in  the  last  fifteen  years  owe  their  origin  to  the  beet  sugar  establish 
ments  of  France  and  Germany. 

"The  effects  produced  upon  agriculture  in  Europe  by  the  cultiva 
tion  of  beets  for  sugar  and  alcohol  have  been  astounding,  and  the 
importance  of  the  interest  is  now  everywhere  acknowledged. 

"  In  the  cane  sugar  countries  upon  the  territory  surrounding  a 
sugar  establishment  no  crop  is  to  be  seen  but  the  cane,  while  cattle 
and  sheep  are  few.  Jn  the  sugar  districts  of  Europe,  on  the  con 
trary,  the  fields  in  the  vicinity  of  a  sugar  manufactory  are  covered 
with  the  greatest  diversity  of  crops,  among  which  are  beets,  wheat,  rye. 
oats,  barley,  corn,  rape,  flax,  tobacco,  and  all  the  cultivated  grasses. 
Every  field  is  cultivated  close  up  to  the  roadside,  and  the  stables  are 
filled  with  fine  cattle,  sheep,  horses,  and  swine.  No  farmer  needs 
to  be  told  which  system  is  the  best  and  most  enduring." 

Thus,  mj  fellow-citizens,  this  feeble  child,  created  by 
protection,  fostered  by  prohibition,  and  sustained  by  a 
protective  tariff,  now  pays  from  $40  to  $85  a  ton  taxes  to 
the  Government.  It  gives  the  people  sugar  such  as  I  hold 
in  my  hand — the  product  of  the  soil  of  Illinois,  as  beau 
tiful  loaf  sugar  as  I  ever  saw,  and  which  you  will 
be  able  to  buy,  not  for  twenty  cents  a  pound,  the  price 
you  now  pay,  but  for  four  cents,  when  you  learn  to  depend 
on  your  own  resources  and  withdraw  your  patronage  from 
England,  Spain  and  their  colonies.  Thus,  protection  wise 
ly  administered,  always  proves  a  boon  to  the  consumer. 

Let  me  give  you  another  striking  illustration  of  this 
important  and  inflexible  truth.  During  the  war  the  Cen 
tral  Eailroad  of  Pennsylvania  and  the  Philadelphia,  Wil 
mington,  and  Baltimore  Companies  needed  a  few  steel 
rails.  They  sent  an  agent  to  England  to  buy  them  at  the 
cheapest  rate.  He  could  not  get  them  for  less  than  §150 
in  gold  per  ton,  which,  as  gold  was  at  $2.40,  made  every 
ton  of  that  railroad  steel,  duties  included,  cost  over  $400,  in 
currency.  The  officers  of  these  and  other  companies  de 
termined  to  build  a  steel  rail  manufactory,  and  relieve  our 
transporters  of  such  exactions.  The  city  of  Harrisburg 
tendered  them  twenty-five  acres  of  ground  on  which  to 
put  it.  They  imported  a  thousand  steel  makers  and  their 
families  from  England,  put  up  their  machinery,  and  made 
a  batch  of  rails.  They  then  concluded  to  go  on  manu 
facturing,  and  the  company,  every  one  of  which  was  an 
officer  of  a  railroad  company,  who  owned  a  large  amount 


208  AMERICAN   INDUSTRY   AND    FINANCE. 

of  stock,  agreed  between  the  stockholders  of  the  railroad 
companies  and  the  managers  of  the  steelworks,  what  would 
be  a  fair  price,  so  as  to  give  the  holders  of  the  steel  works 
a  fair  profit,  and  the  railroad  companies  in  which  they 
were  interested  steel  rails  at  a  fair  price.  One  hundred 
and  thirty  dollars  currency  was  fixed  as  the  price.  The 
news  went  to  England  in  the  next  steamer,  that  they  were 
making  steel  rails  in  Pennsylvania  at  $130  currency  per 
ton.  Until  the  mail  brought  replies  to  these  communica 
tions,  for  there  was  no  telegraph  then,  the  English  agents 
still  asked  $150  in  gold.  But  the  day  the  next  English 
mail  came  in,  every  English  agent  was  offering  steel  rails 
at  $120  currency.  [Laughter.]  The  establishment  of 
one  steel  factory  created  this  vast  difference  in  prices. 
Now,  mark  you,  when  English  monopolists  found  that 
their  American  markets  were  gone,  the  leading  steel 
makers  of  England,  the  "  Butchers,"  came  over  and 
bought  a  property  which  lies,  part  in  my  district  and 
part  in  the  Fifth,  and  are  building  immense  steel  works, 
with  British  capital,  and  will  bring  another  thousand  steel 
workers  and  their  families  to  add  to  the  strength  and 
power  of  our  country,  and  eat,  not  one-half  of  one  per 
cent,  of  Western  grain,  but  feed  wholly  on  provisions 
grown  on  the  soil  of  America.  [Applause.] 

I  believe  firmly  in  the  protective  policy.  I  would  pro 
tect  every  industry  that  cannot  certainly  be  developed 
without  it,  and  would  withdraw  protection  as  soon  as  it 
was  able  and  strong  enough  to  stand  competition  with  the 
lower  wages  of  other  countries.  But  what  I  am  now 
here  specially  for  is  to  ask  that  the  people  of  the  West,  in 
common  with  those  of  all  other  sections  of  the  country, 
will  demand  the  repeal  of  those  internal  taxes,  which  bur 
den  our  industry,  and  give  old  step-mother  England  an 
advantage  in  our  markets.  We  can  raise  money  enough 
without  these  taxes  on  our  industry.  Why  should  we 
hurry  to  pay  our  debt?  England  has  not  hurried  to  pay 
hers,  and  her  credit  has  not  suffered.  She  provides  by 
taxing  a  few  articles  a  sufficient  sum  annually  to  pay  her 
current  expenses,  pay  the  interest  on  her  debt,  and  to 
show  that  she  could  cut  down  her  debt  if  she  wanted  to. 
We  can  raise  from  taxes  on  whisky,  tobacco,  and  malt 
liquors,  and  by  seeing  to  it  that  the  taxes  are  collected 
(applause),  money  enough — the  tariff'  standing  as  it  is — to 
pay  the  interest  on  the  debt  and  to  meet  the  current  ex- 


AMERICAN    INDUSTRY   AND   FINANCE.  209 

penses  of  the  Government,  and  lay  by  a  few  millions  an 
nually  for  payment  on  the  principal  of  the  debt. 

We  have  paid  in  the  last  two  years  over  two  hundred 
and  forty  million  of  dollars  of  the  principal  of  the  debt. 
In  other  words,  we  have  added  $240,000,000  to  the  price 
of  American-made  goods,  and  given  foreign  goods  that 
advantage  over  them  in  our  market ;  and  I  come  to  urge  the 
West  to  join  with  the  East  in  demanding  that  our  taxes  may 
be  simplified  and  reduced,  that  industry  may  be  relieved, 
and  to  appeal  to  an  enterprising  people  to  bless  themselves 
by  lifting  millions  of  the  poor,  oppressed,  degraded,  but 
skilful,  and  would-be  industrious  laboring  people  of  Great 
Britain  out  of  pauperism  into  the  life,  and  light,  and  glory 
of  free  American  Republicanism. 
14 


CONTRACTION   THE   ROAD  TO  BANKRUPTCY : 
NOT   TO   RESUMPTION. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
JANUARY  18TH,  1868. 

The  House  being  in  the  Committee  of  the  Whole  on  the  state  of 
the  Union — 

Mr.  Kelley  said : 

Mr.  Chairman  :  War  is  not  an  unmitigated  evil.  It 
calls  into  action  the  worst  of  human  passions  and  the 
highest  of  human  virtues.  It  contrasts  the  spirit  that  con 
ceived  and  gloated  over  the  horrors  of  Libby,  Belle  Isle, 
and  Andersonville,  by  the  uncomplaining  patriotism  and 
fortitude  with  which  those  horrors  were  endured.  It  may 
be  called  the  science  of  destruction,  yet  it  develops  the 
germs  of  future  prosperity,  evokes  wealth  from  unrecog 
nized  sources,  and  frequently  leaves  communities,  which 
for  the  time  it  seems  to  have  decimated  and  desolated, 
richer  than  they  were  in  the  peaceful  seasons  which  pre 
ceded  it.  This  is  not  often  true  of  mere  dynastic  wars, 
but  of  such  as  involve  a  question  between  forms  of  gov 
ernment,  or  are  waged  for  the  transfer  of  territory  from  an 
oppressive  to  a  liberal  government,  it  is  almost  an  invaria 
ble  consequence. 

The  unparalleled  struggle  through  which  we  have  gone 
was  of  the  latter  class,  and  illustrates  most  forcibly  the 
truth  that  in  God's  providence,  so  often  inscrutable,  war 
has  its  purposes.  We  mourn  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
the  prematurely  dead,  among  whom  were  the  bravest,  best, 
and  most  beautiful  of  the  circles  in  which  they  moved. 
The  maimed  soldier  meets  us  at  every  turn  in  the  bustling 
highway,  and  the  widows  of  those  who  fell  for  our  coun 
try  have  not  yet  laid  aside  their  weeds  or  their  tender 
children  lost  the  memory  of  the  lineaments  of  him  they 
loved,  and  who,  but  for  his  patriotism,  might  have  lived 
to  shield  them  from  the  ills  they  endure  in  poverty  and 
orphanage.  They  suffer,  but  the  people  in  whose  cause 
210 


CONTRACTION  THE   ROAD   TO   BANKRUPTCY.        211 

they  suffer  were  richer,  more  powerful,  and  consequently 
abler  to  endure  additional  taxation,  on  the  19th  of  April, 
1865,  when  Johnston  surrendered,  than  they  were  on  the 
14th  of  April,  1861,  when  the  guns  of  the  rebellion 
opened  on  Fort  Surnter. 

Mr.  Chairman,  I  venture  the  assertion,  arid  doubt  not 
that  history  will  demonstrate  its  correctness,  that  the  war 
for  the  suppression  of  the  rebellion  developed  a  produc 
tive  power  in  the  country  more  than  equal  to  the  indebt 
edness,  national,  State,  and  municipal,  incurred  in  its 
support  and  for  the  payment  of  bounties  and  pensions. 
And  when  gentlemen  speak  of  securing  the  results  of  the 
war  I  ask  them  to  regard  this  fact,  and  to  see  to  it  that  it, 
as  well  as  the  purely  political  results  of  the  struggle,  be 
secured,  in  order  that  those  who  survive  its  victims  may 
share  its  happier  consequences.  The  policy  which  had 
with  rare  and  brief  intervals  controlled  the  legislation  of 
the  country  from  its  foundation  to  the  opening  of  the 
rebellion  was  not  calculated  to  develop  the  resources  or 
improve  the  condition  of  the  laboring  people  of  the  coun 
try.  It  did  not  aim  at  these  results.  It  was  conceived 
and  enforced  by  those  whose  interests  were  peculiar  and 
adverse  to  the  general  prosperity.  Under  the  ancient 
regime  the  legislative  power  of  the  country  resided  for 
more  than  sixty  years  in  a  Democratic  congressional  cau 
cus,  the  preponderance  in  which  of  the  slaveholders  of  the 
South  was  almost,  if  not  absolutely  without  intermission. 
Controlling  the  caucus  of  the  dominant  party,  they  con 
trolled  the  legislation  of  Congress,  and  except  in  the  brief 
periods  from  1825  to  1833  arid  from  1848  to  1847  the 
policy  of  the  caucus  was  to  prevent  the  diversification  of 
employments,  impair  the  demand  for,  and  so  diminish  the 
wages  of,  free  labor,  and  by  compelling  the  masses  to  en 
gage  in  the  production  of  provisions  to  so  cheapen  them 
as  to  make  it  to  the  advantage  of  the  slave-owner  to  pro 
duce  nothing  but  leading  staples,  and  depend  upon  the 
farmers  of  the  North  for  cheap  food  for  themselves,  their 
animals,  and  slaves.  It  was  their  aim  to  make  mechanical 
labor  unprofitable  and  degrading,  that  they  might  be  able 
to  discourage  immigration  by  contrasting  the  condition  of 
the  well-fed  slave  with  that  of  the  laborer  of  the  North, 
who  in  freedom  should  by  the  exercise  of  his  skill  be  able 
to  obtain  but  a  precarious  support  for  himself  and  family. 
I  do  not  make  this  arraignment.  History  presents  it. 


212          CONTRACTION"   THE    ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY. 

That  remarkable  southern  book,  "  Cotton  is  King,"  is  but 
an  elaboration  of  it  running  through  well-nigh  a  thousand 
finely-printed  pages  ;  and  in  his  remarkable  address  at  the 
close  of  the  grand  fair  of  the  Mechanics  arid  Agricultural 
Fair  Association  of  Louisiana,  held  in  the  city  of  New  Or 
leans,  November,  1866,  one  of  the  ablest  writers  and  most 
cogent  thinkers  of  the  South,  Wm.M.Burwell,  Esq.,  in  their 
jibehalf,  pleaded  guilty  to  it  when,  in  stating  "such  points 
of  southern  opinion  and  policy  as  bear  upon  the  causes  of 
subjugation/'  he  thus  enumerated  them  : 

"  1.  That  the  Federal  Government  had  no  right  to  administer  any 
duties  save  those  which  were  written  down  in  its  charter. 

"  2.  That  staple  culture  by  slave  labor  was  the  most  honorable, 
the  most  virtuous,  and  the  most  military  system  of  State  polity. 

"  3.  That  commerce,  the  mechanic  arts,  and  the  banking  system 
were  incompatible  with  the  social  safety  of  the  slave  States,  and 
tended  to  disparage  the  high  standard  of  virtue,  courage,  intellect, 
and  patriotism  which  accompanied  the  pursuits  of  agriculture  and 
the  institution  of  slavery. 

"  4.  That  great  cities  were  great  sores,  aggregations  of  people  an 
evil,  immigrant  numbers  and  capital  not  desirable,  and  works  of  in 
ternal  commerce  only  to  be  allowed  where  they  were  built  at  the 
private  cost  of  those  who  used  them.  The  ocean  was  regarded  as  a 
'  scene  of  strife,'  and  it  was  thought  our  ships  and  workshops  should 
be  stationed  beyond  the  Atlantic." 

Concise  as  these  propositions  are,  they  present  a  com 
prehensive  statement  of  the  policy  of  the  leaders  of  the 
Democratic  party.  They  were  foes  to  commerce  and  the 
mechanic  arts,  and,  in  view  of  the  extent  of  our  country, 
its  boundless,  varied,  and  equally-distributed  natural  re 
sources  succeeded  to  a  degree  that  is  almost  incredible  in 
stationing  "  our  ships  and  workshops  beyond  the  Atlan 
tic."  In  the  southern  theory  of  society  the  free  laboring 
man  had  no  place;  its  philosophy  gave  him  no  considera 
tion.  It  regarded  him  as  a  nuisance,  an  interloper,  who 
had  no  place  in  a  well  regulated  State.  In  its  ideal  re 
public  there  were  to  be  two  classes  of  people  only  :  the 
wealthy  producers  of  agricultural  staples  and  the  slaves 
they  owned,  and  upon  the  sweat  of  whose  brows  and  by 
the  sale  of  whose  offspring  they  should  live. 

But  so  great  were  our  natural  advantages,  so  ingenious 
our  people,  and  so  largely  was  American  industry  and  in 
ventive  power  protected  by  our  patent  laws,  that  in  spite 
of  legislation,  which  produced  commercial  crises  with 
almost  regular  periodicity,  the  manufacturing  interests  of 
the  North  ha4  come  to  be  very  considerable.  We,  how- 


CONTRACTION"   THE    ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY.         213 

ever,  still  remained  a  commercial  dependency  of  England, 
and  were,  indeed,  her  principal  and  most  profitable  depen 
dency  ;  and,  sir,  notwithstanding  the  enormous  develop 
ment  of  our  productive  power  during  the  war,  we  continue 
to  be  such,  as  is  shown  by  the  official  statement  of  the 
exports  from  the  United  Kingdom  to  the  various  coun 
tries  of  the  world  during  the  first  half  of  the  last  two 
years.  In  introducing  this  table  the  compiler  remarks 
that  there  has  been  a  considerable  falling  off  in  our 
American  trade  during  the  last  year,  owing  chiefly  to  the 
prohibitory  tariff  and  the  scanty  harvest  of  1866.  It  ap 
pears  that  the  exports  from  the  United  Kingdom  to  her 
two  greatest  dependencies  in  the  periods  designated  were  : 

1866.  1867. 

To  India £9,406,838     £10,135,920 

To  the  United  States 15,228,220       11,951,179 

India  stands,  in  the  exhibit  from  which  I  obtain  these 
figures,  at  the  head  of  the  list  of  England's  colonial  cus 
tomers,  and  the  United  States  heads  the  column  of  foreign 
dependents. 

Sir,  it  would  weary  the  committee  were  I  to  bring  to 
its  attention  the  many  illustrations  that  occur  to  my  mind 
of  the  wondrous  increase  of  our  productive  power  dur 
ing  the  war,  but  I  beg  you  to  bear  with  me  while  I  sub 
mit  a  few  of  them.  The  war,  endeavor  to  disguise  it  as 
we  may,  was  an  irrepressible  conflict  between  two  systems 
of  labor,  one  of  which  regarded  the  laborer  as  a  thing  to 
be  owned,  and  the  other  of  which  recognized  his  man 
hood,  kindled  his  hope,  and  quickened  his  aspirations  by 
opening  to  him  the  avenues  to  all  public  honors,  and 
sought  to  secure  him,  however  humble  he  might  be,  such 
wages  for  his  work  as  would  enable  him  to  shelter,  care 
for,  and  give  culture  to  his  family.  The  triumph  of  free 
dom  over  slavery  in  this  contest  was  of  inestimable  pecu 
niary  value.  But  at  the  beginning  of  the  war  we  were 
unable  to  clothe  our  soldiers  and  sailors  or  provide  them 
with  arms  and  ammunition  of  our  own  production.  Most 
of  the  men  who  responded  to  President  Lincoln's  first  re 
quisition  for  troops,  though  newly  equipped,  were  in  rags 
when  they  reached  the  capital.  Our  "boys  in  blue,"  after 
a  few  days'  exposure  to  alternate  rain  and  sun,  were  sur 
prised  to  find  themselves  wearing  red  coats,  and  looking 
rather  like  English  than  American  soldiers.  The  pros 
pect  of  war  had  flooded  the  country  with  what  Carlyle 


214:          CONTRACTION    THE    ROAD    TO    BANKRUPTCY. 

calls  "  cheap  and  nasty  "  British  fabrics,  the  warp  and 
woof  of  which  were  shoddy,  and  the  indigo  blue  of  which 
had  been  derived  from  logwood. 

We  had  neither  the  wool  in  which  to  clothe  them  nor  the 
spindles  and  looms  to  fashion  it  into  cloth.  Nor  were  we 
capable  of  producing  iron  fit  for  gun-barrels  or  cannon  ; 
yet  when  at  the  close  of  the  war  the  armies  marched  on 
successive  days  through  Pennsylvania  avenue,  more  than 
one  hundred  and  eighty  thousand  strong,  they  were  clad 
as  substantially — I  think  I  may  say  with  truth  more  com 
fortably  and  substantially — than  had  ever  been  a  great 
army  returning  from  the  fields  of  its  conquest  at  the  close 
of  a  protracted  war.  They  then  wore  the  wool  of  America, 
spun  by  American  spindles  and  woven  in  American  looms  ; 
and  I  was  assured  about  that  time  by  the  Secretary  of 
War  and  gentlemen  connected  with  the  ordnance  depart 
ment  that  their  choicest  arms  were  of  native  production, 
and  that  we  could  manufacture  better  gun-barrel  iron 
than  we  could  import. 

Every  railroad  company  whose  line  runs  north  and 
south  was  then  suffering  depression,  if  not  actual  embar 
rassment.  Their  condition  was  not  improving  but  deteri 
orating,  notwithstanding  the  fact  that  communities  in  the 
same  latitude  can  and  should  produce  the  same  commodi 
ties,  and  that  the  natural  course  of  inter-State  and  inter 
national  trade  is  across  and  not  along  parallels  of  latitude. 
The  Democratic  policy  of  stationing  "  our  ships  and  work 
shops  beyond  the  Atlantic"  contravened  these  natural 
laws,  and  by  compelling  the  people  of  the  North  and 
South  to  make  their  commercial  exchanges  beyond  the 
Atlantic  instead  of  in  our  own  country,  had  deprived  the 
roads  from  north  to  south  of  business  adequate  to  their 
maintenance.  They  were  single-track  roads,  and  a  num 
ber  of  them  had  fallen  into  such  dangerous  dilapidation 
as  to  cause  them  to  be  regarded  as  "  man-traps "  and 
"dead-falls."  Yet  such  was  the  healthful  influence  of 
active  business  and  prompt  pay  in  the  irredeemable  notes 
of  a  somewhat  expanded  currency  that  many  of  them, 
while  reducing  or  extinguishing  their  indebtedness,  re 
newed  and  doubled  their  tracks  during  the  war,  and  all  of 
them  procured  adequate  motive  power  and  rolling  stock 
for  any  amount  of  business,  public  or  private,  that  might 
offer. 

At  the  beginning  of  the  war  the  iron  of  Lake  Superior 


CONTRACTION   THE    ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY.         215 

was  not  an  article  of  general  commerce,  but  at  its  close 
the  Marquette  region  was  furnishing  one-eighth  of  the 
entire  production  of  the  country.  In  1861  we  were  de 
pendent  on  foreign  factories  for  steel;  but  under  the  im 
pulse  of  the  war  we  are  manufacturing  ordinary  and 
Bessemer  steel  in  such  quantities  and  of  such  superior 
quality  as  to  justify  the  hope  that  a  few  years  will  enable 
us  to  compete  in  the  markets  of  Central  and  South 
America  with  the  nations  on  which  we  have  hitherto  de 
pended.  At  the  beginning  of  the  war  the  great  western 
coal  basin  had  not  been  tested  experimentally.  Intelli 
gent  gentlemen  from.  Indiana,  Illinois,  Missouri,  Iowa,  and 
Kansas  spoke  of  the  wonderful  coal  deposit  which  under 
lies  their  respective  States  as  a  matter  of  belief  or  theory  ; 
but  now  every  railroad  through  those  States  has  either 
provided  itself  or  is  devising  means  to  procure  cars 
adapted  to  the  transportation  of  that  cheap  and  convenient 
fuel.  Brazil,  Indiana,  was  then  an  obscure  and  inconsid 
erable  railroad  station,  but  now,  as  the  centre  of  an  iron 
and  coal  producing  district,  its  population  is  increasing 
with  greater  rapidity  than  that  of  any  town  in  the  State, 
and  trains  of  cars  laden  with  coal  leave  it  daily  for  the  iron 
mountain  of  Missouri,  to  supply  the  furnaces  and  forges 
of  that  vicinity  with  fuel,  and  return  from  the  iron  moun 
tain  to  Brazil  freighted  with  ore  to  be  smelted  and  wrought 
in  the  midst  of  coal  beds  which  experience  has  proven  to 
be  an  inexhaustible  deposit  of  almost  pure  carbon.  Ac 
tive  demand  and  prompt  payment  in  irredeemable  green 
backs  have  elicited  the  demonstration  at  both  points,  that 
in  Indiana  and  Missouri  are  natural  deposits  that  will,  if 
properly  developed,  before  the  close  of  another  genera 
tion,  dwarf  the  relative  importance  of  England,  Wales,  or 
Belgium  as  coal,  iron,  and  steel  producing  centres. 

Thus  did  the  country  respond  to  the  necessities  of  the 
Government,  and  thus  did  the  demand  for  industry  created 
by  the  war  and  prompt  pay  by  the  Government  for 
all  that  it  bought  from  its  citizens,  in  irredeemable  but 
well-secured  greenbacks  though  it  was,  enable  the  people 
to  respond  promptly  and  amply  to  its  calls  for  men,  money, 
and  materials.  Our  progress  was  not,  as  already  appears, 
confined  to  the  military  direction,  but  other  branches  of 
industry  were  also  quickened  into  life.  At  the  beginning 
of  the  war  the  West  made  no  zinc  or  brass  or  clocks  or 
watches,  and  she  depended  on  foreign  nations  for  sugar 


216          CONTRACTION   THE    ROAD   TO   BANKRUPTCY. 

and  molasses.  But  now  the  zinc  of  Illinois  and  the  copper 
of  Michigan,  smelted  by  native  fuel,  is  furnishing  the 
West  with  merchant  brass  that  is  preferred  to  foreign  by 
engravers.  The  town  of  Elgin,  Illinois,  which  rivals  the 
most  beautiful  New  England  villages,  and  which  produces 
watches  equal  to  the  best  productions  of  any  nation,  has 
sprung  up  since  Sumter  was  fired  on  ;  and  in  Austin,  a 
suburb  of  Chicago,  not  yet  three  years  old,  they  make 
clocks,  the  brass,  the  glass,  the  enamel,  the  steel,  and  the 
frames  of  which,  whether  simple  or  ornate,  are  all  of  na 
tive  production,  and  into  which  no  particle  of  material 
enters  that  has  ever  been  on  salt  water  or  paid  duty  at  a 
custom-house.  The  inhabitants  of  the  town  of  Chats- 
worth,  Illinois,  did  not  number  two  hundred  at  the  close 
of  1863  ;  they  now  number  nearly  two  thousand  people, 
who  use  in  their  intercourse  fourteen  of  the  dialects  of 
Europe,  and  are  producing  this  year  nearly  one  thousand 
tons  of  sugar  from  beet  roots,  and  an  amount  of  molasses 
that  will  pay  each  laborer  good  wages,  and  for  the  coal 
consumed  by  the  whole  community  ;  and  not  only  did  we 
prove  ourselves  able  to  clothe  our  army  and  improve  the 
material,  texture,  and  durability  of  its  clothing,  but  we 
increased  the  variety  and  improved  our  woolen  fabrics  for 
private  wear  so  much  that  we  are  able  to  enter  the  list 
with  the  most  successful  woolen  manufacturing  nations. 
But,  sir,  that  we  did  during  the  war  add  to  our  produc 
tive  power  and  realized  wealth  more  than  the  principal  of 
our  debt  is  to  my  mind  demonstrated  by  the  fact  that 
though  the  taxes  upon  our  industry,  trade,  income,  and 
the  earnings  of  our  corporations,  were  heavier  than  now 
by  hundreds  per  cent.,  they  were,  after  the  first  year  of 
the  war,  or  from  the  time  that  green-backs  relieved  the 
want  of  adequate  currency,  paid  cheerfully,  because  they 
were  paid  from  monthly  or  annual  profits.  Our  people 
were  steadily  increasing  in  wealth,  every  exchange  of 
property  between  them  was  for  mutual  advantage,  and  by 
increasing  their  wealth  they  added  to  the  taxable  resources 
of  the  country.  The  able  report  of  the  special  Commis 
sioner  of  the  Revenue,  D.  A.  Wells,  Esq.,  thus  corrobo 
rates  this  view : 

"As  has  been  already  shown,  the  national  expenditures,  exclusive 
of  appropriations  for  the  redemption  of  the  public  debt  and  for  in 
terest,  attained  during  the  five  years  from  1861  to  1866  the  extraor 
dinary  average  of  over  seven  hundred  and  twelve  million  dollars  per 


CONTRACTION   THE    ROAD   TO   BANKRUPTCY.         217 

annum,  to  which  must  also  be  addded  the  great  increase  during-  the 
same  period  of  State  and  local  expenditures.  Now,  while  by  far  the 
largest  portion  of  the  money  represented  by  this  expenditure  was 
borrowed,  it  must  nevertheless  be  borne  in  mind  that  the  average 
annual  money  statement  for  the  years  specified  is  in  a  great  degree, 
if  not  entirely,  the  measure  of  the  labor  annually  furnished  to  the 
Government  in  the  form  of  commodities  or  services  rendered  in  the 
Army  or  Navy,  for  the  war  in  the  main  was  conducted  by  means  of 
the  services  of  the  soldiers  rendered  at  the  time,  and  by  means  of 
the  food,  clothing,  and  material  of  war  raised  or  made  during  the 
period  of  hostilities,  and  for  which  money  or  an  acknowledgment  of 
indebtedness  was  given.  It  therefore  appears  that  during  the  years 
from  1861  to  1866  labor  and  commodities  were  continually  withdrawn 
from  the  productive  employments  of  peace  to  the  destructive 
occupations  of  war,  and  that  the  measure  of  this  unproductive  di 
version  was  in  excess  of  $712,000,000  per  annum,  and  yet  during  the 
continuance  of  all  this  drain  the  northern  and  Pacific  States  did  not 
cease  to  make  a  real  progress  in  the  creation  of  substantial  wealth. 
Thus  the  aggregate  of  the  northern  crops,  measured  in  bulk  and 
quantity,  and  not  in  money,  did  not  decrease,  but  increased;  the 
area  of  territory  placed  under  cultivation  was  continually  enlarged  ; 
railroads  continued  to  be  built,  mines  to  be  opened,  and  mills,  stores, 
and  dwellings  to  be  erected." 

As  if  to  emphasize  this  statement,  the  Commissioner 
adds  the  following  foot  note  : 

"  It  is  not  believed  that  any  great  amount  of  northern  capital  ac 
cumulated  prior  to  the  war  was  used  or  destroyed  during  the  war, 
but  that  the  service  and  commodities  used  were  mainly  the  product 
of  the  time."  * 

Mr.  Chairman,  so  immensely  had  ready  demand,  the 
rapid  circulation  of  commodities,  and  prompt  pay  in 
greenbacks  stimulated  our  industry  that  the  amount  of 
American  productions — agricultural,  mineral,  scientific,  or 
mechanical — that  had  been  devoted  to  the  work  of  destruc 
tion  are  thus  shown  to  have  been  in  excess  of  the  require 
ments  for  civil  life  in  a  season  of  prosperity,  and  certainly 
in  increasing  excess  of  the  production  of  former  years. 

But,  sir,  the  war  has  ended;  we  are  again  at  peace; 
the  jurisdiction  of  the  Government  extends  over  the 
whole  country.  Twelve  million  producers  and  consumers 
have  been  brought  within  our  jurisdiction  by  the  extiii 
guishment  of  the  confederate  government,  under  whose 
laws  they  had  lived  and  to  whose  treasury  they  had  paid 
tribute  during  the  war,  and  the  Commissioner  in  this  con 
nection  submits  this  question,  to  which  I  propose,  briefly 
as  I  can,  to  reply.  He  asks  : 

*  It  should  be  noted  that  this  was  said  by  Mr.  Wells  before  his  official  visit  to 
England,  during  which  his  opinions  underwent  a  radical  change. 


218          CONTRACTION   THE    ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY 

"  If  a  portion  of  the  country  could  contribute  of  its  surplus  labor 
and  capital  an  annual  value  of  $21  07  per  capita  for  destructive 
purposes,  will  it  not  be  easy  for  the  whole  country,  with  its  labor 
and  capital  restored  to  productive  employments,  to  contribute  $8  73 
per  capita  for  the  payment  of  interest,  expenses,  and  the  reduction 
of  the  debt?" 

This  diminished  rate  of  taxation,  the  Commissioner  tells 
us,  will  not  only  provide  for  an  annual  expenditure  of 
$140,000,000  for  ordinary  expenses,  $130,000,000  for 
interest  on  the  public  debt,  but  $50,000,000  annually  for 
the  reduction  of  the  principal  of  the  debt. 

Mr.  Chairman,  whether  the  people  can  bear  this  rate 
of  taxation,  reduced  as  it  is,  will  depend  upon  our  legisla 
tion.  Had  Congress  one  year  ago,  when  I  urged  it  to  that 
course,  repealed  the  taxes  that  have  not  only  burdened  all 
but  prostrated  many  of  the  industries  of  the  country  dur 
ing  the  past  year,  and  withheld  from  the  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury  the  power  to  contract  the  currency,  I  believe 
there  would  be  no  doubt  on  this  question.  My  views  on 
this  point  are  the  results  of  much  deliberation,  and  have 
undergone  no  recent  change.  Experience  has  but  made 
that  history  which  for  the  two  last  years  I  have  uttered  to 
the  House  as  prediction.  When  addressing  the  House  on 
January  31,  1866,  I  said : 

"  England,  if  supreme  selfishness  be  consistent  with  sagacity,  has 
been  eminently  sagacious  in  preventing  us  from  becoming  a  manu 
facturing  people;  for  with  our  enterprise,  our  ingenuity,  our  freer 
institutions,  the  extent  of  our  country,  the  cheapness  of  our  land, 
the  diversity  of  our  resources,  the  grandeur  of  our  seas,  lakes,  and 
rivers,  we  should  long  ago  have  been  able  to  offer  her  best  workmen 
such  inducements  as  would  have  brought  them  by  millions  to  help 
bear  our  burdens  and  tight  our  battles.  We  can  thus  raise  the 
standard  of  British  and  continental  wages  and  protect  American 
workmen  against  ill-paid  competition.  This  we  must  do  if  we  mean 
to  maintain  the  national  honor.  The  fields  now  under  culture,  the 
houses  now  existing,  the  mines  now  being  worked,  the  men  we  now 
employ,  cannot  pay  our  debt.  To  meet  its  annual  interest  by  tax 
ing  our  present  population  and  developed  resources  would  be  to 
continue  an  ever-enduring  burden. 

"  The  principal  of  the  debt  must  be  paid  ;  but  as  it  was  contracted 
for  posterity  its  extinguishment  should  not  impoverish  those  who 
sustained  the  burdens  of  the  war.  I  am  not  anxious  to  reduce  the 
total  of  our  debt,  and  would,  in  this  respect,  follow  the  example  of 
England,  and  as  its  amount  has  been  fixed  would  not  for  the  present 
trouble  myself  about  its  aggregate,  except  to  prevent  its  increase. 
My  anxiety  is  that  the  taxes  it  involves  shall  be  as  little  oppressive 
as  possible,  and  be  so  adjusted  that,  while  defending  our  industry 
against  foreign  assault,  they  may  add  nothing  to  the  cost  of  those 


CONTRACTION    THE    ROAD    TO    BANKRUPTCY.         219 

necessaries  of  life  which  we  cannot  produce,  and  for  which  we  must 
therefore  look  to  other  lands.  The  raw  materials  entering  into  our 
manufactures,  which  we  are  yet  unable  to  produce,  but  on  which 
we  unwisely  impose  duties,  I  would  put  into  the  free  list  with  tea, 
coffee,  and  other  such  purely  foreign  essentials  of  life,  and  would 
impose  duties  on  commodities  that  compete  with  American  produc 
tions,  so  as  to  protect  every  feeble  or  infant  branch  of  industry  and 
quicken  those  that  are  robust.  I  would  thus  cheapen  the  elements 
of  life  and  enable  those  whose  capital  is  embarked  in  any  branch  of 
production  to  offer  such  wages  to  the  skilled  workmen  of  all  lands 
as  would  steadily  and  rapidly  increase  our  numbers,  and,  as  is  always 
the  case  in  the  neighborhood  of  growing  cities  or  towns  of  consider 
able  extent,  increase  the  return  for  farm  labor;  this  policy  would 
open  new  mines  and  quarries,  build  new  furnaces,  forges,  and  factor 
ies,  and  rapidly  increase  the  taxable  property  and  inhabitants  of 
the  country.  Would  the  south  accept  this  theory  and  enter  heartily 
upon  its  execution,  she  would  pay  more  than  now  seems  her  share 
of  the  debt  and  feel  herself  blessed  in  the  ability  to  do  it.  Her  cli 
mate  is  more  genial  than  ours ;  her  soil  may  be  restored  to  its 
original  fertility;  her  rivers  are  broad  arid  her  harbors  good  ;  and, 
above  all,  hers  is  the  monopoly  of  the  fields  for  rice,  cane  sugar,  and 
cotton.  Let  us  pursue  for  twenty  years  the  sound  national  policy 
of  protection,  and  we  will  double  our  population  and  more  than 
quadruple  our  capital,  and  reduce  our  indebtedness  per  capita  and 
per  acre  to  little  more  than  a  nominal  sum.  Thus  each  man  can 
'  without  moneys  '  pay  the  bulk  of  his  portion  of  the  debt  by  blessing 
others  with  the  ability  to  bear  an  honorable  burden." 

Confirmed  in  the  correctness  of  these  views  by  subse 
quent  observation  and  reflection,  at  the  final  session  of 
the  Thirty-Ninth  Congress  I  introduced  a  resolution  in 
structing  the  Committee  of  Ways  and  Means — 

"  To  inquire  into  the  expediency  of  immediately  repealing  the 
provisions  of  the  internal  revenue  law  whereby  a  tax  of  five  per 
cent,  is  imposed  on  the  mechanical  and  manufacturing  industry  of 
the  country." 

And  on  the  earliest  day  the  rules  would  permit  I 
offered  another  resolution  declaring — 


D 


"That  the  proposition  that  the  war  debt  of  the  country  should  be 
extinguished  by  the  generation  that  contracted  it  is  riot  sanctioned 
by  sound  principles  of  national  economy  arid  does  not  meet  the 
approval  of  this  House." 

On  the  3d  of  January,  1867,  in  addressing  the  House  in 
opposition  to  the  views  of  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  in 
favor  of  the  maintenance  of  extraordinary  taxes,  contraction 
of  the  currency,  and  resumption  of  specie  payments  with 
in  two  years  from  the  date  of  his  Fort  Wayne  speech,  or 
his  annual  report,  and  the  extinguishment  of  not  less 


220         CONTRACTION   THE    ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY. 

than  $100,000,000  of  the  principal  of  the  debt  annually, 
I  said : 

"  Peace  is  restored,  our  currency  approximates  the  specie  stand- 
ard,  arid  it  is  discovered  that  by  aid  of  our  inordinate  internal  taxes 
foreign  manufacturers  are  monopolizing  our  home  market.  Our 
publishers  buy  their  paper  and  print  and  bind  their  books  in  Eng 
land  or  Belgium ;  our  umbrella-makers  have  transferred  their  work 
shops  to  English  towns ;  our  woolen  and  worsted  mills  are  closed  or 
closing,  and  the  laborers  in  these  branches  are  not  only  wasting  their 
capital,  which  consists  in  their  skill  and  industry,  but  drawing  from 
the  savings  banks  or  selling  the  Government  bonds  in  which  they 
had  invested  their  small  accumulations  to  maintain  their  families 
during  the  winter;  arid  our  enlarged  importations  of  foreign  goods 
are  swelling  the  balance  of  trade  against  us  and  preparing  us  for 
general  bankruptcy." 

And  again : 

"  The  experiment,  if  attempted  as  a  means  of  hastening  specie 
payments,  will  prove  a  failure,  but  not  a  harmless  one.  It  will  be 
fatal  to  the  prospects  of  a  majority  of  the  business  men  of  this 
generation,  and  strip  the  frugal  laboring  people  of  the  country  of  the 
small  but  hard-earned  sums  they  have  deposited  in  savings  banks  or 
invested  in  Government  securities.  It  will  make  money  scarce  and 
employment  uncertain.  Its  object  is  to  reduce  the  amount  of  that 
which  in  every  part  of  our  country  and  for  the  hundreds  of  thou 
sands  of  millions  of  dollars  of  domestic  trade  is  money  and  to  in 
crease  its  purchasing  power ;  and  by  unsettling  values  it  will  para 
lyze  trade,  suspend  production,  arid  deprive  industry  of  employment. 
It  will  make  the  money  of  the  rich  man  more  valuable  and  deprive 
the  poor  man  of  his  entire  capital,  the  value  of  his  labor,  by  depriv 
ing  him  of  employment.  Its  first  effect  will  be  to  increase  the  rate 
of  interest  and  diminish  the  rate  of  wages,  and  its  final  effect  wide 
spread  bankruptcy  and  a  more  protracted  suspension  of  specie  pay 
ments." 

Sir,  these  predictions  were  not  only  not  heeded  but 
were  denounced  as  the  vagaries  of  a  mere  theorist  by 
gentlemen  whose  position  made  their  voices  potential; 
and  I  remember  that  when  the  productions  of  the  hand- 
loom  weavers  of  the  country  had  been  freed  from  taxation 
by  the  votes  of  both  Houses  the  committee  of  conference 
upon  the  disagreeing  votes  of  the  two  Houses  on  the  tax 
bill,  seizing  the  fact  that  the  Senate  and  House  had 
differed  as  to  the  use  of  a  verb,  restored  the  provision  pro 
viding  for  the  tax,  and  the  chairman  of  the  committee  in 
each  House  proclaimed  the  possibility  of  the  exemption 
of  these  comparatively  unimportant  productions  producing 
a  deficit  in  the  revenue.  Some  reduction  in  the  scale 
of  taxation  was  made  by  the  bill  to  which  I  refer,  and  it 
is  well  for  the  country  that  it  was.  Large  as  it  was,  it 


CONTRACTION   THE    ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY.         221 

would  have  been  better  bad  every  direct  tax  upon  our 
industry  been  removed.  Nor  would  the  revenue  of  the 
Government  have  suffered  from  the  change,  for  we  col 
lected  during  the  year  1866-67  $143,904,880  more  than 
was  required  for  payment  of  interest  on  the  public  debt 
and  current  expenses.  These  inordinate  exactions  deter 
mined  the  line  between  profit  and  loss  on  many  branches 
of  industry  and  diminished  our  productions  by  paralyzing 
or  suppressing  such  branches.  Without  the  $67,778,082.- 
70,  the  amount  derived  from  direct  taxes  on  manufactures 
other  than  spirits,  malt  liquors,  and  tobacco  in  its  various 
forms,  we  would  have  been  able  to  extinguish  more  than 
seventy-five  million  dollars  of  the  principal  of  the  debt. 

Permit  me  to  say,  if  I  may  use  a  homely  figure,  that  by 
attempting  to  collect  such  heavy  taxes  while  contracting 
the  currency,  we  lighted  our  candle  at  both  ends.  The 
loom  and  the  spindle,  no  longer  able  to  yield  profit  to 
their  proprietor,  stand  idle;  the  fires  are  extinguished  in 
forge  and  furnace,  and  the  rolling-mill  does  not  send  forth 
its  hum  of  cheerful  and  profitable  industry.  On  one  day 
of  last  month  eighteen  hundred  operatives  in  the  glass 
factories  of  Pittsburg  were  deprived  of  the  poor  privilege 
of  earning  wages  by  honest  toil  at  the  trade  in  which  they 
were  skilled.  The  establishments  in  which  they  worked 
are  closed.  In  the  absence  of  productive  employment 
for  men  or  machinery  the  small  holders  of  bonds  are  sell 
ing  them  to  save  themselves  from  bankruptcy  if  they 
are  proprietors  of  establishments,  or  to  feed  themselves 
and  families  in  involuntary  idleness  if  they  are  laborers 
whose  hard-earned  savings  have  been  loaned  to  the  Govern 
ment  in  its  exigency.  Look  where  we  may,  to  any 
section  of  the  country,  we  hear  of  "shrinkage"  in  the 
value  of  manufactured  goods,  of  reduction  of  wages,  or 
of  the  hours  of  labor,  of  factories  running  on  part  time, 
or  closed  or  to  be  closed.  I  present  no  jaundiced  or 
partisan  view  of  the  case,  for  the  gentleman  who  submitted 
to  this  House  the  report  of  the  committee  of  conference 
to  which  I  have  alluded,  and  who  resisted  proposed  re 
ductions  of  taxes  with  such  persuasive  ability,  [Mr.  Morrill, 
of  Vermont,]  in  a  recent  discussion  in  the  Senate  on  the 
repeal  of  the  cotton  tax,  said  : 

"  It  may  be  said  that  the  South  are  clamoring  for  the  repeal  of  the 
tax  on  cotton.  Is  there  any  less  clamor  in  the  West  or  the  North 
or  the  East  for  a  repeal  of  taxation?  I  deny  it.  I  say  there  is 


222 


CONTRACTION   THE    ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY 


as  much  urgency  for  a  relief  from  taxation  in  the  North,  the  East, 
and  the  West  as  in  the  South.  Look  at  the  industries  that  are  at 
the  present  moment  unusually  depressed.  Take,  for  instance,  the 
entire  woolen  interest.  There  is  not  an  establishment  that  is  not 
losing  money  to-day.  Take  the  wool-grower;  not  a  pound  of  wool 
raised  last  year  that  will  bring  within  ten  cents  per  pound  of  its 
cost.  Take  the  cotton  interest ;  the  whole  circle  of  manufactures 
are  in  no  better  circumstances.  Look  at  the  value  of  their  stocks  ; 
for  instance,  take  the  Bates  manufacturing  stock  of  Maine,  worth 
two  years  ago  one  hundred  and  sixty  cents  on  the  dollar,  now  there 
are  more  sellers  than  buyers  at  one  hundred.  Take  the  Lyman 
mills  on  the  Connecticut,  worth  two  years  ago  ninety-eight  to  one 
hundred,  now  selling  at  sixty-nine  or  less  ;  arid  so  I  might  go  on 
almost  through  the  whole  list.  They  all  suffer.  Take  the  West — 
Ohio,  Illinois,  or  Iowa — look  at  their  hog  crop.  Why,  if  they  had 
given  away  all  their  hogs,  or  if  they  had  slaughtered  them  a  year 
ago  and  thrown  them  away,  they  would  have  been  better  off  to-day. 
They  have  absolutely  lost  their  hog  crop  by  feeding  out  grain  to 
them,  which  unfed  would  have  brought  more  than  all  their  pork." 

Mr.  Chairman,  accepting  the  business  of  the  oldest  and 
best- man  aged  savings  bank  for  the  receipt  of  small  depos 
its  in  Philadelphia  as  a  good  index  to  the  condition  of 
the  laboring  class  of  the  country,  I  have  obtained  a  state 
ment  of  the  number  and  amount  of  drafts  made  by  the 
depositors  whose  whole  deposit  is  under  one  hundred 
dollars,  and  of  the  whole  number  of  drafts  of  depositors  for 
the  month  of  December  of  the  years  1865,  1866,  and 
1867,  and  the  total  amount  drawn  in  each  year.  It  is  as 

follows : 

\ 


Months. 

Year. 

Total 
deposit 
under 
$100. 

Whole 
number  of 
payments. 

Amount 
withdrawn. 

Dec 

1865 

846 

1,186 

99,603  10 

Dec         .... 

1866 

811 

1,174 

104,430  95 

Dec  

1867 

1,128 

1,596 

144,205  70 

To  gentlemen  used  to  large  business  transactions  the 
movement  of  the  small  sums  enumerated  in  this  exhibit 
may  not  seem  important,  but  they  tell  a  story  of  bank 
ruptcy  as  grievous  to  the  victim  whose  hours  of  toil  were 
solaced  by  the  reflection  that  he  was  by  his  small  deposits 
garnering  a  trifling  capital  for  his  children  or  a  shelter 
for  his  age  as  is  one  which  is  telegraphed  to  the  press  of 
every  section  of  the  country  by  reason  of  the  large 
amount  involved.  Nay,  more  than  that,  these  drafts  upon 


CONTRACTION   THE   ROAD  TO   BANKRUPTCY.         223 

the  small  accumulations  of  years  of  toil  tell  a  story  of 
practical  agrarianism  and  confiscation  that  would  shock 
gentlemen  if  it  applied  to  the  bonds  or  land  of  the  wealthy. 
The  attempt  to  force  a  resumption  of  specie  payments  by 
contracting  a  volume  of  currency  which  was  actively, 
legitimately,  and  profitably  employed,  is  as  dishonest  as  it 
is  unwise.  The  object  and  effect  of  such  a  movement  is 
to  increase  the  purchasing  power,  the  value  of  the  rich 
man's  hoarded  or  invested  dollars,  and  its  projectors  pause 
not,  though  they  discover  that  it  robs  millions  of  labor 
ers  of  their  whole  estate.  The  laborer's  income  is  derived 
from  the  exercise  of  his  thews  and  sinews  and  the  skill 
of  his  cunning  right  hand.  These  are  his  estate — these 
and  his  little  savings — and  of  these  millions  are  being- 
robbed  by  the  mad  attempt  of  the  Secretary  of  the  Treas 
ury  to  bring  about  specie  payments  while  the  balance  of 
trade  is  heavily  against  us,  and  our  gold-bearing  bonds  are 
so  largely  held  by  foreigners  that  resumption  would  in 
less  than  thirty  days  induce  the  return  of  bonds  enough  to 
drain  us  of  specie  and  make  us  feel  the  curse  of  absentee 
ism  as  distinctly  as  Ireland  ever  felt  it.  Were  our  bonds 
held  at  home,  or  were  commercial  exchanges  greatly  in 
our  favor,  we  might  maintain  a  forced  resumption ;  but 
with  our  bonds  abroad,  and  the  balance  of  trade  heavily 
against  us,  we  could  not  maintain  it  a  month.  And  if 
Congress  does  not  restrain  Mr.  McCulloch  from  persisting 
in  the  attempt  he  will  unsettle  the  value  of  every  species 
of  property,  curtail  the  productive  power  of  the  country, 
bankrupt  men  of  enterprise,  and  rob  millions  of  laboring 
people  of  their  whole  estate. 

But  permit  rne  to  inquire  what  effect  this  experiment 
will  have  on  the  public  revenues  ?  Can  an  honest  bank 
rupt  contribute  much  to  the  exchequer  of  his  country  ? 
Are  those  who  are  conducting  business  at  a  loss  apt  to 
make  large  contributions  to  the  fund  derived  from  income 
tax?  And  are  unemployed  laborers  who  have  drawn  and 
consumed  their  last  dollar  in  a  condition  to  buy  dutiable 
or  taxable  commodities  ?  No,  sir  ;  as  the  number  in  each 
of  these  classes  increases  the  public  revenue  diminishes  ; 
and  in  view  of  the  facts  I  have  hastily  presented  I  am 
prepared  to  say  that  with  full  employment,  even  though 
prices  had  continued  as  high  as  they  were  during  the  war, 
which  I  maintain  was  impossible  under  the  influence  of 
our  increasing  activity  and  productive  power,  the  people 


224:          CONTRACTION    THE    ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY. 

could  better  pay  the  taxes  they  then  endured,  heavy  as 
they  were,  than  they  can  with  a  contracting  currency,  low 
prices,  and  but  partial  or  no  employment  for  men  and  ma 
chinery,  pay  the  greatly  diminished  rate  suggested  by  the 
Commissioner. 

Mr.  Chairman,  two  policies  were  open  to  us  at  the  close 
»f  the  war.  We  have  tried  one,  and  the  results  are  but 
too  painfully  apparent ;  the  other  is  still  open  to  us.  It  is 
true  we  cannot  repair  the  losses  already  endured,  but  we 
can  check  the  downward  tendency,  quicken  industry,  and 
give  a  new  impulse  to  the  productive  power  of  the  coun 
try.  It  was  open  to  us  to  diminish  the  depreciation 
in  the  rate  of  wages  by  diminishing  taxes  and  fur 
nishing  as  we  had  done  during  the  war,  a  sound  circu 
lating  medium  adequate  in  volume  for  the  rapid  ex 
change  of  commodities  among  our  own  people,  and  thus 
secure  employment  to  our  laborers  with  fair  wages  for 
their  work  ;  or,  on  the  other  hand,  we  could  by  imposing 
taxes  not  demanded  by  our  exigencies  and  contracting  the 
currency  impair  confidence,  force  sales,  palsy  enterprise, 
reduce  wages,  and  deprive  the  laborer  of  a  market  for  the 
only  commodity  he  has  to  sell — his  industry. 

Gentlemen  will  say  there  can  for  the  present  be  no  em 
ployment  because  the  markets  are  overstocked,  and  there 
is  what  political  economists  often  speak  of,  ''a  glut  in  the 
market."  Sir,  the  time  has  never  been  when  the  markets 
of  the  world  were  glutted.  When  that  event  shall  come, 
every  home  will  be  well  furnished,  and  every  human  being 
well  clothed.  A  superabundance  of  the  necessaries  of 
life  cannot  exist  while  the  urgent  wants  of  millions  can 
not  be  supplied.  Our  markets  are  not  glutted.  The  stock 
of  goods  of  every  kind  in  the  hands  of  merchants  is  unu 
sually  low,  and  there  are  unemployed  people  in  the  coun 
try  who  need  them  all  and  who  would  gladly  labor  for  the 
means  to  purchase  them  all.  The  wretch  that  shivers  in 
a  cheerless  home  without  food,  fuel,  or  adequate  clothing ; 
she  who,  ill-fed  herself,  shares  her  last  crust  with  her  hun 
gry  children ;  and  they  who  in  the  midst  of  winter  are 
deprived  of  the  privilege  of  toiling,  and  as  their  goods  are 
thrown  rudely  into  the  street  realize  a  landlord's  power 
when  rent  is  in  arrear,  do  not  believe  that  the  market  is 
glutted.  Nor  is  it.  The  disease  from  which  we  suffer 
is  not  glut  or  plethora.  Its  seat  is  in  the  functions  of 
circulation.  It  is  congestion  produced  by  a  financial 


CONTRACTION   THE   ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY.        225 

tourniquet  applied  by  a  charlatan.  That  phrase  "  glut  in 
the  market "  involves  a  perversion  of  terms,  and  is  used  to 
express  the  fact  that  the  masses  are  from  some  cause  una 
ble  to  consume  their  usual  supply  of  the  comforts  or 
necessaries  of  life.*  It  does  not,  as  it  implies,  express  the 
fact  that  there  is  an  over  supply  of  commodities  essential 
to  the  comfort  of  man,  but  that  there  is  financial  derange 
ment.  It  is  a  convenient  phrase  for  the  theorist,  a  veil 
used  to  conceal  a  fact  the  occurrence  of  which  should  ad 
monish  every  statesman  that  there  is  something  wrong  in 
the  prevailing  practice  of  government. 

The  author  of  the  next  treatise  on  popular  fallacies 
should  make  "  glut  in  the  market "  the  subject  of  a  leading 
chapter  ;  for  they  who  use  the  phrase  invariably  confound 
terms  and  designate  the  consequence  as  the  cause.  Thus 
the  Irish  Republic,  in  the  course  of  a  generally  able  article 
in  its  issue  of  January  4th,  says  : 

"From  all  parts  of  Massachusetts  and  Connecticut  we  have  been 
receiving,  during  the  past  six  weeks,  the  very  unwelcome  intelli 
gence  that  mill-owners  and  manufacturers  were  either  contracting 
their  producing  operations  or  suspending  them  altogether.  Kun- 
ning  half  or  quarter  time  appears  to  be  the  order  of  the  day  ;  while 
not  {infrequently  the  engine  fires  are  blown  out  and  the  machinery 
left  to  rust  in  idleness.  The  cause  is  obvious.  There  is  little  or  no 
demand  for  goods.  The  consequences  are  what  we  have  already 
stated.  The  hands  of  hundreds  of  thousands  of  honest  workmen 
are  idle,  and  their  children  are  ill-fed  and  ill-clad  under  the  biting 
blasts  of  a  North  American  winter." 

Let  me  point  out  the  fallacy  of  this  statement.     Fires 

*  There  are  other  means  of  producing  an  apparent  glut  in  the  market  than  by 
suddenly  contracting  the  currency  of  a  busy  and  prosperous  people.  The  work 
ing  men  of  England  in  a  blind  effort  to  improve  their  condition,  have  limited  the 
amount  of  production,  and  thereby  glutted  their  market  as  effectually  as  Mr. 
McCulloch  would  have  glutted  ours  had  Congress  not  prohibited  further  con 
traction.  In  "  Social  Politics  "  Prof.  Kirk  says  : 

"  It  may  not  be  out  of  place  here  to  notice  that  there  is  a  burden  of  no  small 
magnitude  left  behind  among  the  working  men  in  their  own  state  of  mind  on 
social  matters.  Many  of  them  actually  think  the  less  they  work  the  better  ! 
And  they  insist  that  no  man  shall  do  more  than  a  very  limited  amount  of  work 
if  they  can  prevent  him!  They  insist  that  no  one  shall  learn  to  work  be 
yond  a  very  limited  number  !  They  and  their  children  are  actually  dying  in 
hundreds  for  want  of  houses  to  live  in,  and  yet  they  think  that  the  fewer  houses 
they  build  the  better !  They  are  miserably  clad,  and  yet  they  think  the  fewer 
clothes  they  make  the  better !  They  are  in  semi-starvation  because  of  high 
prices,  and  yet  they  actually  think  that  the  higher  they  can  make  the  cost  of 
production,  the  better  for  them  !  " 

"  Production  is  yet  so  far  below  the  wants  of  men  ;  in  other  words,  there  are 
yet  so  many  starving  and  ill-clad,  ill-housed  thousands  in  the  world,  that 
'  over-production '  is  ridiculous." — Ibid. 

15 


226  CONTRACTION   THE    ROAD   TO   BANKRUPTCY. 

are  blown  out  and  machinery  left  to  rust  in  idleness,  not 
because  there  is  no  demand  for  goods,  but  because  through 
out  the  South  and  West  there  is  no  circulating  medium 
with  which  to  effect  exchanges;  and  the  policy  of  the 
Secretary  of  the  Treasury  with  the  cry  of  the  creditor 
class  for  resumption  have  destroyed  confidence  in  indi 
vidual  credit.  The  proposition  should  be  stated  thus  : 

"There  is  little  or  no  demand  for  goods.  The  cause  is  obvious: 
it  is  that  the  hands  of  hundreds  of  thousands  of  honest  workmen 
are  idle,  and  their  children  ill-fed  and  ill-clad,  because  mill-owners 
arid  manufacturers  have  been  compelled  to  contract  their  operations 
and  withhold  from  laborers  employment  and  wages  with  which  they 
would  be  able  to  purchase  the  products  of  the  farmer  and  manufac 
turer." 

The  general  theory  I  am  advancing  is  not  new,  and  is 
one  that  should  never  be  disregarded  by  those  who  legis 
late  for  the  people  of  a  republic.  The  social  evils  we  are 
enduring,  the  bankruptcy  that  is  overtaking  so  many  men 
of  enterprise,  the  want  and  enforced  idleness  that  prevail 
so  largely  among  our  laboring  classes,  are  due  to  two 
causes : — excessive  internal  taxation,  and  the  curtailment 
of  our  currency  at  a  time  when  the  numbers  and  activities 
of  our  people  were  rapidly  increasing.  The  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury  and  his  adherents  are  responsible  for  this 
general  prostration  of  credit  and  business.  They  talk  of 
the  honor  of  the  country,  and  the  necessity  of  maintaining 
it  by  making  the  paper  dollar  equal  to  the  gold  dollar, 
and  of  hastening  the  day  when  our  bonds  shall  be  paid  in 
gold.  The  means  to  which  they  resort  will  not  produce 
the  results  they  desire,  but  will  defeat  them.  Nor  are 
those  who  resist  them  hostile  to  the  bondholder.  They 
aim  to  secure  the  laborer  the  possession  and  just  fruits  of 
his  hard  inheritance,  and  by  the  rapid  development  of  the 
boundless  resources  of  the  country  and  the  restoration  of 
general  prosperity  to  enable  the  Government  to  meet  the 
utmost  of  its  obligations  with  honor  at  maturity.  The  con 
test  is  between  the  creditor  and  the  debtor  class — the  men 
of  investments  and  the  men  of  enterprise ;  and  during  all 
such  contests  the  laboring  classes  are  inevitable  sufferers. 

The  issue  thus  raised  is  as  old  as  civilization.  And 
now,  as  always  heretofore,  the  creditor  class  is  the  aggres 
sor.  Alison,  in  his  "  History  of  Europe  "  from  the  fall  of 
Napoleon  to  the  accession  of  his  nephew,  says : 


CONTRACTION   THE    ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY.         227 

"  Whoever  has  studied  with  attention  the  structure  or  tendencies 
of  society,  either  as  they  are  portrayed  in  the  annals  of  ancient  story 
or  exist  in  the  complicated  relations  of  men  around  us,  must  have 
become  aware  that  the  greatest  evils  which  in  the  later  stages  of 
national  progress  come  to  afflict  mankind,  arose  from  the  undue 
influence  and  paramount  importance  of  realized  riches.  That  the 
rich  in  the  later  stages  of  national  progress  are  constantly  getting 
richer  and  the  poor  poorer  is  a  common  observation,  which  has  been 
repeated  in  every  age,  from  the  days  of  Solon  to  those  of  Sir  Robert 
Peel ;  and  many  of  the  greatest  changes  which  have  occurred  in  the 
world — in  particular  the  fall  of  the  Roman  empire — may  be  distinct 
ly  traced  to  the  long-continued  operation  of  this  pernicious  tend 
ency For  the  evils  complained  of  arose  from  the 

unavoidable  result  of  a  stationary  currency,  coexisting  with  a  rapid 
increase  in  the  numbers  and  transactions  of  mankind ;  and  these 
were  only  aggravated  by  every  addition  made  to  the  energies  and 
productive  powers  of  society." 

Again,  he  says : 

"  But  if  an  increase  in  the  numbers  and  industry  of  man  coexists 
with  a  diminution  in  the  circulating  medium  by  which  their  trans 
actions  are  carried  on,  the  most  serious  evils  await  society,  and  the 
whole  relations  of  its  different  classes  to  each  other  will  be  speedily 
changed ;  and  it  is  in  that  state  of  things  that  the  saying  proves 
true  that  the  rich  are  every  day  growing  richer  and  the  poor  poor 
er." — Alison's  History  of  Europe,  1815  to  1852,  chapter  1. 

As  Sir  Archibald  Alison  was  not  gifted  with  more  than 
human  prescience  he  could  not  have  foreseen  the  condition 
of  our  country  in  the  years  that  are  passing.  If,  therefore, 
he  described  it,  he  did  so  by  declaring  a  general  law. 
That  he  did  portray  our  condition  with  nice  discrimina 
tion  no  one  can  controvert.  Let  us  see  how  exact  a  com 
pliance  the  contraction  policy  is  producing  with  all  the 
conditions  the  conjunction  of  which  he  tells  us  must  pro 
duce  the  most  serious  evils  to  society. 

The  close  of  the  war  found  us  with  a  currency  expanded 
somewhat  beyond  the  amount  to  which  we  had  been  used 
before  the  rebellion,  but  with  everybody  in  the  North 
well  employed.  Men  of  character  were  able  to  borrow 
money  at  moderate  rates  of  interest,  and  were  everywhere 
engaging  in  new  enterprises  that  were  not  merely  specula 
tive,  but  calculated  to  add  to  individual  and  national 
wealth.  Labor  was  in  demand  at  fair  wages.  It  is  true 
that  food  was  high,  for  a  great  war  had  raged  through  a 
series  of  years,  and  been  succeeded  by  years  of  drought 
or  excessive  rain,  during  which  the  fields  had  not  yielded 
their  usual  crops.  This  no  legislation  could  have  averted ; 


228         CONTRACTION   THE    ROAD    TO    BANKRUPTCY. 

but  in  spite  of  it  the  people  at  large  were  prosperous  and 
confident  that  a  fruitful  year  would  adjust  the  cost  of  food 
to  the  prices  of  other  commodities.  From  ten  to  twelve 
millions  of  our  people,  occupying  more  than  six  hundred 
thousand  square  miles  of  our  most  fertile  territory,  which 
abounds  in  water-power  and  varied  mineral  resources, 
were  almost  without  currency.  Their  whole  capital,  other 
than  lands  and  houses,  railroads  and  canals,  had  been  in 
vested  in  confederate  loans  or  otherwise  exhausted. 
Their  banks  and  insurance  companies  were  bankrupt. 
They  had  cotton,  tobacco,  naval  stores,  and  the  fields  from 
which  to  produce  these  and  all  other  agricultural  com 
modities.  They  had  laborers  skilled  in  their  arts  of  cul 
tivation,  and  willing  to  toil  for  wages  unreasonably  low, 
but  they  had  no  currency,  no  circulating  medium  with 
which  to  make  commercial  or  other  exchanges  of  property 
or  to  pay  their  laborers. 

At  the  same  time  an  unusual  stream  of  emigration  was 
flowing  to  us  from  transatlantic  countries.  Enterprise  was 
pushing  rapidly  westward,  and  towns  and  cities  were 
rising  where,  when  the  war  began,  the  buffalo  had 
roamed  over  unbroken  prairies.  With  these  additions  to 
our  population  and  to  the  area  over  which  it  was  to  cir 
culate  what  was  there  to  indicate  the  propriety  of  a  curtail 
ment  of  the  medium  by  which  transactions  between  man 
and  man  and  community  and  community  were  to  be  carried 
on?  For  myself  I  was  unable  to  see  any,  and  protested 
against  the  mad  theories  of  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury 
and  his  disciples.  In  the  course  of  my  remarks  on  the  3d 
of  January,  1867,  to  which  I  have  alluded,  I  said: 

"  Neither  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  nor  Congress  know 
whether  our  currency  is  in  excess  of  the  amount  required  by  legiti 
mate  and  healthful  trade,  or  if  it  be,  how  long  it  will  remain  so  if 
undisturbed  by  legislation.  Nor  can  we  settle  these  points  by  an 
appeal  to  experience,  for  many  of  our  conditions  are  novel.  That 
would  be  a  curious  and  instructive  calculation  which  would  show 
the  country  the  precise  demand  for  currency  created  by  the  opera 
tion  of  the  Bureau  of  Internal  "Revenue,  or  by  the  enlargement  of 
the  Army  and  Navy  and  clerical  force  of  the  Government. 

"  Under  the  discipline  of  Providence  the  southern  people  will, 
before  many  years  glide  away,  consent  to  permit  their  fields  to  be 
tilled,  their  mines  to  be  worked,  and  their  cities  to  be  rebuilt  and 
expanded ;  and  who  can  tell  the  amount  of  currency  that  will  then 
be  required  by  the  four  million  enfranchised  slaves  and  the  millions 
of  poor  whites,  who  did  not  in  the  past,  but  are  henceforth  to  earn 
wages  and  buy  and  sell  commodities,  or  for  handling  the  crops  and 


CONTRACTION  THE   ROAD  TO   BANKRUPTCY.         229 

mineral  productions  of  the  South?  Since  we  last  adjourned  the 
iron  horse  has  crossed  Nebraska  on  one  of  the  routes  to  the  Pacific, 
and  his  snort  has  been  heard  in  the  neighborhood  of  Fort  Riley  on 
another ;  and  during  the  last  year  three  hundred  thousand  industri 
ous  people,  who  had  been  fed  and  clothed  through  unproductive 
childhood  at  the  cost  of  other  nations,  came  and  cast  their  lot 
among  us  to  till  our  fields,  smelt  our  ores,  work  our  metals,  and 
manage  our  spindles  and  looms ;  and  I  cannot  guess  what  amount 
of  currency  these  energetic  people  and  the  westward-marching 
column  of  our  civilization  will  require.  But,  sir,  of  one  thing  I  am 
certain,  which  is  that  had  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  not  de 
stroyed  all  sense  of  security  in  the  future,  the  demand  for  currency 
to  purchase,  especially  in  the  South,  mineral  and  other  lands,  and 
develop  their  productive  power,  would  have  prevented  the  acumula- 
tion  of  the  immense  deposits  which  now  lie  paralyzed  in  bank  or  are 
loaned  on  call  to  speculators  in  the  necessaries  of  life.  We  unsettled 
values  and  made  or  scattered  fortunes  by  the  rapid  expansion  of  the 
currency  ;  and  the  people  implore  us  to  avoid  another  violent  change 
fraught  with  like  consequences,  and  to  stay  the  work  of  contraction 
till  we  shall  have  ascertained,  at  least  proximately,  the  amount  of 
currency  required  by  healthy  and  legitimate  trade." 

But,  Mr.  Chairman,  gentlemen  ask,  do  you  not  wish  to 
return  to  specie  payments?  I  answer,  yes;  but  not  by  the 
way  of  bankruptcy  and  repudiation  ;  and  that  way  leads 
contraction  in  the  midst  of  an  increase  such  as  never 
existed  before  in  the  numbers  of  men  and  fields  for  their 
activity.  Return  to  specie  payments !  Are  we  doing  it  ? 
No,  sir.  The  difference  between  the  greenback  and  gold 
dollar  widens  with  each  month.  And  while  a  greenback 
dollar  will  buy  less  gold  it  will  purchase  much  more  of 
any  other  commodity  than  it  would  a  year  ago.  The  rate 
of  interest  demanded  for  loans  in  the  West  and  South  is 
so  inordinate  that  it  has  suspended  enterprise  and  must 
exhaust  the  resources  of  any  man  who  attempts  to  pay  it; 
and  while  the  laboring  people  are  idle  the  capital  which 
should  furnish  them  employment  may  be  borrowed  from 
the  banks  of  Boston  or  New  York,  in  whose  vaults  the 
bulk  of  our  currency  has  accumulated,  by  those  who  have 
gold  or  United  States  bonds  to  offer  as  security,  at  four 
per  cent,  per  annum.  Contraction  has  destroyed  con 
fidence.  The  possessors  of  "realized  riches"  have  no 
faith  in  spindles  and  looms  that  are  producing  goods  for  a 
falling  market,  or  forges  and  furnaces  the  productions  of 
which  must  be  sold  at  a  loss,  and  invest  their  funds  in 
Government  bonds,  or  let  them  lie  on  deposit  till  they  can 
buy,  at  a  small  percentage  of  their  value,  mills,  factories, 
mines,  and  other  valuable  properties,  when  bankruptcy 


230         CONTRACTION  THE   EOAD  TO   BANKRUPTCY. 

shall  cause  them  to  be  exposed  at  public  or  judicial  sale. 
Sir,  we  are  not  on  the  road  to  resumption,  and  will  not  be 
till  we  restore  confidence  and  quicken  industry  by  repeal 
ing  needless  taxes  which  are  giving  foreign  manufacturers 
an  advantage  in  our  market,  and  deprive  the  Secretary 
of  the  Treasury  of  his  power  to  contract  the  currency 
and  tamper  with  the  market  value  of  every  species  of 
property  by  secret  operations  in  gold  and  the  credit  of  the 
country. 

Mr.  Chairman,  the  Secretary  and  his  adherents  will 
assume  to  find  a  response  to  the  suggestions  I  have  made 
in  the  facts  set  forth  by  the  Special  Commissioner  of 
Eevenue  in  his  valuable  report  showing  that  the  income 
of  the  country  from  either  internal  revenue  or  customs 
has  not  fallen  off  during  the  last  two  years.  The  Com 
missioner's  statements  are  indisputable,  and  I  thank  him 
for  the  industry,  patience,  and  care  he  has  exhibited  in 
procuring  and  digesting  the  materials  for  his  report. 
But,  sir,  there  is  a  fact  that  deprives  this  response  of  any 
thing  like  conclusive  power.  It  is  not  alluded  to  by 
Mr.  Wells,  because  it  touched  no  point  he  assumed  to 
discuss.  Let  me  state  it.  The  revenues  of  the  country 
from  1860  to  1865  were  derived  from  the  loyal  States. 
During  that  time  the  confederate  States  did  not  contribute 
to  our  public  revenue,  and  Maryland.  Kentucky,  Tennes 
see,  and  Missouri  were  ravaged  by  war.  To  find  a  reply 
to  my  argument  in  the  Commissioner's  report  it  should 
show  not  only  that  our  revenues  during  the  last  fiscal 
year  have  exceeded  those  of  1864  and  1865  in  the  ratio 
of  our  ordinary  growth  and  progress,  but  also  how  largely 
the  ten  States  now  being  reconstructed,  with  Missouri, 
Tennessee,  Kentucky,  and  Maryland,  when  freed  from  the 
tramp  of  war,  were  able  contribute  to  the  resources  of  the 
country.  To  this  fact  the  Commissioner  does  not  allude. 
No,  sir ;  it  requires  the  contributions  made  by  the  people 
of  the  insurgent  and  border  slave  States  during  the  last 
fiscal  year  to  furnish  the  Commissioner  with  the  gratify 
ing  figures  he  presents  to  the  country  and  its  creditors. 
A  fair  statement  of  the  account  would  contain  the  amount 
received  from  the  southern  States  as  a  credit  and  be 
debited  with  the  amount  lost  by  the  paralysis  of  industry 
and  the  productive  power  of  the  North.  Were  the  ac 
count  thus  stated  it  would  be  apparent  to  all  that,  not 
withstanding  the  addition  of  fifty  per  cent,  to  the  taxable 


CONTRACTION  THE   EOAD  TO   BANKRUPTCY.         231 

population,  the  current  revenue  derived  by  the  Govern 
ment  was  not  increased,  but  simply  steadily  maintained. 

Gentlemen  may  say  that  the  South  has  yielded  but  little 
internal  revenue  besides  that  derived  from  the  cotton  tax, 
and  I  freely  admit  that  she  has  not  contributed  so  largely 
as  we  might  well  have  hoped;  but  I  affirm  that  her  con 
tributions  would  have  been  much  greater  had  our  policy 
been  wiser.  It  has  affected  that  section  of  the  country 
more  potently  for  evil  than  it  has  the  North.  Our  society 
was  not  disorganized  and  our  industrial  force  was  admira 
bly  arranged  and  producing  its  best  results,  yet  we  are 
suffering  derangement  and  paralysis.  Wide  sections  of 
the  South  had  been  ravaged  by  war,  and,  as  I  have 
already  said,  its  financial  institutions  and  the  accumulated 
capital  of  its  citizens  not  invested  in  lands  and  buildings 
had  been  absorbed  by  the  confederate  loan  or  consumed 
in  the  war ;  but  by  judicious  treatment  its  recuperation 
should  have  been  so  rapid  as  to  have  been  the  marvel 
.of  the  world.  That  the  natural  resources  of  the  South 
are  greater  than  those  of  the  North  is  undeniable.  She 
is  capable  of  producing  every  agricultural  product  that 
can  be  grown  in  our  climate.  Her  mineral  resources  are 
greater  and  more  varied  than  ours ;  she  lies  near  the  sea 
and  abounds  in  navigable  rivers,  affording  cheap  water 
transportation  to  seaports  for  the  greater  portion  of  her 
productions,  and  to  her  belongs  the  monopoly  of  the  pro 
duction  of  cotton,  fine  tobacco,  rice,  and  naval  stores,  and, 
until  now  that  we  are  availing  ourselves  of  the  beet,  of 
the  sugar  fields  of  the  country  also.  Immense  bodies  of 
land,  as  fertile  as  any  in  the  country,  and  which  has  never 
felt  the  pressure  of  the  plowshare,  are  to  be  found  in  every 
southern  State.  Louisiana  alone  has  sixty  thousand  such 
acres  which  will  yield  cotton  or  sugar,  wheat  or  corn. 
Marvellous  as  was  the  increase  of  the  productive  power 
of  the  loyal  States  during  the  war,  that  of  the  southern 
States  almost  equalled  it.  Gentlemen  will  not  forget  that 
her  Merrimac  had  sunk  the  Cumberland  before  our  first 
monitor  was  ready  to  measure  power  with  her.  Great 
Britain  supplied  her  with  much  of  her  munitions  of  war, 
but  the  unmechanical  South  overwhelmed  us  with  sur 
prise  by  the  large  share  of  these  she  produced  for  herself. 
Great  Britain  again,  in  defiance  of  our  admirable  blockade, 
clothed  many  of  the  confederate  soldiers,  but  the  spindles 
and  looms  of  the  constantly-increasing  factories  of  the 


232          CONTRACTION    THE    EOAD    TO    BANKRUPTCY. 

South  were  each  year  supplying  a  larger  percentage  of 
cloths  for  civic  and  military  wear.  She  had  depended  on 
New  England  for  boots  and  shoes,  but  she  found  that  she 
could  tan  her  own  hides,  and  people  were  found  to  make 
boots  and  shoes.  Thomasville,  North  Carolina,  is  the 
Lynn,  though  not  the  only  shoe  manufacturing  town  of  the 
South.  Without  detaining  the  committee  by  details  of 
the  improvement  and  extension  of  her  railroad  system, 
I  will  mention  the  fact  that  though  Virginia  and  North 
Carolina  had  never  been  able  to  build  a  road  from  Dan 
ville  to  Greensboro',  whereby  a  central  through  route 
from  North  to  South  would  have  been  completed,  that 
road  was  built  in  the  first  year  of  the  war.  "This  increased 
the  value  of  every  foot  of  a  chain  of  roads  extending  from 
Kichmond  to  New  Orleans,  which  now  carries  a  large 
portion  of  freight  passing  between  the  eastern  States  of 
the  North  and  the  South  and  Southwest. 

But,  sir,  without  elaborating  the  point,  let  me  state  in 
general  terms  that  the  value  of  the  lands  of  the  South 
were  trebled  by  the  recognition  of  facts  which  the  war 
compelled  the  southern  people  to  recognize,  namely  :  that 
they  could  raise  their  own  food,  and  that  they  had  advan 
tages  over  those  on  whom  they  had  hitherto  depended  for 
food  for  man  and  beast  in  the  markets  of  the  eastern 
States,  Central  and  South  America,  the  West  India  Is 
lands,  and  Europe.  As  cotton  and  sugar  had  been  the 
only  crop  of  the  greater  portion  of  their  country  the  peo 
ple  had  corne  to  believe  that  they  had  but  one  harvest 
season — that  in  which  those  crops  were  gathered  and  pre 
pared  for  market.  But  when  the  armies  of  the  confederacy 
had  to  be  fed  from  the  fields  within  its  lines  they  discov 
ered  that  they  had  three  harvest  seasons — the  spring  for 
wheat  and  grasses,  summer  for  corn,  and  autumn  for  cot 
ton  and  sugar.  And  in  this  very  year  many  a  broad  acre, 
after  having  yielded  its  golden  harvest  of  wheat,  will  have 
the  stubble  turned  under  and  be  planted  in  corn  that  will 
mature  before  the  frost  threatens  it.  The  necessities  of 
the  war  also  taught  them  the  value  of  deep  plowing,  fer 
tilizers,  and  of  keeping  procreative  stock  for  the  work  for 
which  they  had  kept  only  mules  in  the  past.  As  an  illus 
tration  of  the  value  of  these  discoveries,  let  me  say  that 
it  is  within  rny  knowledge  that  Mr.  McDonald,  of  Con 
cord,  North  Carolina,  in  order  to  settle  the  question  of  the 
value  of  deep  plowing  and  the  application  of  phosphates 


CONTRACTION    THE   ROAD   TO   BANKRUPTCY.          233 

in  the  production  of  cotton,  tried  two  experiments  on 
fields  which  together  embraced  one  hundred  acres  of  land 
that  had  ever  been  regarded  as  too  poor  for  cotton  land. 
Wishing  to  make  the  experiment  for  public  as  well  as 
private  advantage,  Mr.  McDonald  took  the  opinion  of  the 
planters  of  his  section  of  the  State  as  to  the  possibility  of 
making  cotton  on  such  land,  and  found  no  man  among 
his  neighbors  or  visitors  who  believed  that  it  would  return 
him  the  value  of  the  seed  with  which  he  would  plant  it. 
But  with  a  heavy  old-fashioned  Pennsylvania  plow  he 
broke  the  land  and  turned  in  a  given  amount  of  super 
phosphate  to  the  acre,  and  lo,  when  the  season  came  for 
gathering  cotton  he  had  the  demonstration  that  the  poorest 
land  in  Cabarras  county  had  been  made  to  yield  the  finest 
crop  of  cotton  ever  raised  within  her  limits,  and  which 
many  of  her  citizens  pronounce  the  finest  ever  raised  in 
North  Carolina.  The  many  intelligent  planters  who  ob 
served  this  experiment  now  know  that  by  the  aid  of  pro 
per  implements  and  adequate  stimulants  to  the  soil  their 
fields  may  be  made  to  yield  a  hundred  per  cent,  more  cot 
ton  than  they  ever  have  yielded,  and  that  with  but  fifty 
per  cent,  of  the  labor  hitherto  applied. 

But,  as  I  have  before  said,  the  people  of  this  wonder 
fully  endowed  section  of  our  country  were  without  a  cir 
culating  medium.  This  was  their  paramount  necessity. 
For  the  want  of  it  all  their  interests  were  suffering.  The 
Special  Commissioner  of  Revenue  suggests  that  our  con 
dition  is  such  that  "  soothing  and  sustaining  "  treatment 
rather  than  the  "  heroic  "  is  most  likely  to  promote  and 
hasten  our  recovery,  and  I  beg  leave  to  inquire  whether 
his  suggestion  is  not  much  more  applicable  to  them.  Inor 
dinate  taxes  have  borne  more  heavily  upon  the  people  of 
the  South  than  upon  us,  and  contraction  has  operated  with 
still  more  aggravated  severity  upon  them,  as  whatever  re 
dundancy  there  may  have  been  in  our  currency  at  the 
close  of  the  war  would  have  been  absorbed  by  the  inviting 
fields  of  enterprise  offered  by  the  South,  and  would  have 
gone  there  to  quicken  her  resources  and  enable  her  people 
to  consume  dutiable  goods  and  those  from  which  internal 
revenue  is  collected  by  the  sale  of  stamps.  That  the  pro 
ductive  power  the  war  developed  in  the  South  has  been 
suppressed  by  lack  of  currency,  and  that  by  contraction 
we  are  abstracting  from  her  people  the  little  they  had,  is 
becoming  apparent  to  every  observant  man.  We  find 


234          CONTRACTION    THE   KOAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY. 

evidence  of  it  in  every  paper  that  comes  from  the  South. 
The  Standard,  (Ealeigh,  North  Carolina,)  of  the  4th  in 
stant,  says : 

"  Everything  seems  to  have  fallen  in  price  except  breadstuff's  and 
meats,  which  maintain  former  prices  on  account  of  their  scarcity. 
Judgments  are  passed,  execution  sales  are  common,  the  bankrupt 
law  is  taking  hold  of  estate  after  estate,  property  of  all  kinds  is 
rapidly  falling  in  price,  lands  are  changing  hands  and  will  soon  be 
knocked  off  for  a  mere  song ;  and  there  is  no  prospect,  so  far  as  we 
can  see,  that  this  condition  of  things  will  speedily  improve.  One 
of  the  first  effects  will  be  to  greatly  restrict  if  not  abolish  the  credit 
system.  Every  step,  no  matter  how  painful  or  how  much  to  be  de 
plored,  is  in  that  direction.  Credit  is  based  on  confidence  between 
man  and  man,  and  where  there  is  no  confidence  there  can  be  no 
credit.  The  end  will  be  that  a  large  majority  of  our  people  will  find 
it  impossible  to  meet  their  obligations,  and  must  have  indulgence  in 
some  way,  or  the  hard  earnings  of  many  }rears  will  be  sacrificed 
under  the  sheriff's  hammer  or  in  courts  of  bankruptcy." 

And  a  correspondent  of  the  ISTew  York  Tribune,  writing 
from  Hinesville,  Liberty  county,  Georgia,  last  month, 
says : 

"A  sale  has  taken  place  at  this  county  seat  that  so  well  marks  the 
extreme  depression  in  the  money  market  that  I  send  you  the  par 
ticulars  :  Colonel  Quarterman,  of  this  county,  deceased,  and  his  ex 
ecutor,  Judge  Featter,  was  compelled  to  close  the  estate.  The  pro 
perty  was  advertised,  as  required  by  law,  and  on  last  court  day  it  was 
sold.  A  handsome  residence  at  Walthourville,  with  ten  acres  at 
tached,  out-houses,  and  all  the  necessary  appendages  of  a  first-class 
planter's  residence,  was  sold  for  $60.  The  purchaser  was  the  agent 
of  the  Freedmen's  Bureau.  His  plantation,  four  hundred  and  fifty 
acres  of  prime  land,  brought  $150  ;  sold  to  a  Mr.  Fraser.  Sixty-six 
acres  of  other  land  near  Walthourville  brought  three  dollars  ;  pur 
chaser,  Mr.  W.  D.  Bacon.  These  were  all  bona  fide  sales.  It  was  court 
day,  and  a  large  concourse  of  people  were  present.  The  most  of 
them  were  large  property  owners,  but  really  had  not  five  dollars  in 
their  pockets,  and  in  consequence  would  not  bid,  as  the  sales  were  for 
cash.  In  Montgomery,  Alabama,  lots  on  Market  street  near  the 
capitol,  well  located,  50  feet  by  110  feet,  averaged  but  $250  each. 
The  Welsh  residence  on  Perry  street,  two-story  dwelling  houses,  in 
cluding  four  lots,  sold  for  $3500  ;  Dr.  Robert  M.  Williams  was  the 
purchaser.  The  same  property  in  better  times  would  not  have 
brought  less  than  $10,000.  The  Loftin  place,  near  Montgomery, 
containing  one  thousand  acres,  was  recently  rented  at  auction  for 
forty  cents  an  acre.  The  same  lands  rented  the  present  year  for 
three  dollars  an  acre." 

It  is  proper  that  I  should  admit  that  something  of  this 
depression  is  due  to  the  resistance  leading  men  of  the 
South  present  to  her  constitutional  restoration  to  the 
Union  and  the  hostility  the  baser  sort  of  her  people  ex- 


CONTRACTION   THE   ROAD   TO   BANKRUPTCY.          235 

hibit  toward  northern  settlers  :  yet  there  are  wide  sections 
of  the  country  into  which  northern  men  may  go  and  find 
themselves  welcomed  as  benefactors  if  they  go  to  engage 
in  any  industrial  pursuit ;  and  it  must  also  be  admitted 
that  under  our  present  scale  of  taxation  and  with  the  Sec 
retary  of  the  Treasury  constantly  threatening  contraction 
and  able  to  execute  his  threat,  that  capital  will  not  engage 
in  any  new  enterprise  either  North  or  South. 

Commissioner  Wells  is  right  in  prescribing  "  soothing 
and  sustaining  "  rather  than  "  heroic  "  treatment  for  our 
diseased  body-politic  ;  and  if  the  capitalists  of  the  country 
do  not  wish  to  swell  the  cry  of  repudiation  till  it  shall  be 
come  the  shibboleth  of  a  party,  they  had  better  abate  their 
demand  for  the  further  contraction  of  the  currency  and 
consent  to  the  repeal  of  taxes  that  are  proving  the  cor 
rectness  of  Dean  Swift's  proposition  that  "  We  can  double 
the  taxes  and  diminish  the  income  one-half."  The  rapid 
development  of  the  wondrous  resources  of  our  country 
and  recuperation  of  the  South  will,  under  happier  condi 
tions,  soon  swell  the  volume  of  our  exports  beyond  that 
of  our  imports,  and  enable  us  to  recall  our  bonds  from 
abroad  in  exchange  for  commodities,  and  resume  specie 
payments  without  grinding  into  bankruptcy  or  beggary 
the  men  of  enterprise  and  laborers  of  the  country.  In 
refutation  of  the  favorite  theory  of  the  contractionists  that 
the  price  of  gold  regulates  the  price  of  domestic  produc 
tions  I  pause  to  refer  to  the  fact  that  the  difference. between 
gold  and  greenbacks  widens  daily,  yet  the  purchasing 
power  of  a  greenback  is  now  for  almost  every  article  of 
home  production  twice  what  it  was  when  the  bulk  of  our 
bonds  were  subscribed  for,  and  is  increasing  coevally  with 
a  steady  rise  in  the  price  of  gold.  The  suit  of  clothes  in 
which  I  stand,  and  which  I  know  to  have  been  woven 
from  pure  Ohio  wool,  was  bought  for  forty  dollars  in 
greenbacks ;  not  from  what  is  called  a  slop-shop,  but  from 
the  merchant  tailors  who  have  made  my  clothes  for  years. 
In  1864  it  would  have  cost  twice  that  sum.  Many  styles 
of  cotton  goods  which  were  commanding  an  advance  of 
four  hundred  per  cent,  at  that  time  are  now  selling  at 
prices  less  than  those  they  brought  before  the  war.  If 
any  gentleman  be  disposed  to  dispute  the  increased  general 
purchasing  power  of  greenbacks,  irrespective  of  the  price 
of  gold,  I  recommend  him  to  examine  pages  42,  43,  and 
44  of  the  Report  of  the  Special  Commissioner  of  Revenue. 
He  will  there  find  abundant  evidence  of  the  fact. 


236          CONTRACTION   THE   EOAD   TO   BANKRUPTCY. 

Had  Congress  at  the  close  of  the  war  hastened  to  re 
lieve  the  country  of  the  taxes  against  which  I  am  pro 
testing,  and  while  avoiding  any  expansion  of  the  currency 
proteced  its  volume  from  diminution,  and  assured  the  peo 
ple  that  no  essential  change  in  its  volume  should  be  made 
until  the  business  of  the  country  had  adjusted  itself  to  the 
conditions  of  peace,  production  would  have  advanced  and 
our  bonds  would  have  been  returning  to  us  in  the  pockets 
of  emigrants  or  in  settlement  of  a  favorable  balance  of 
trade,  and  millions  of  people  North  and  South,  who  are 
to-day  eating  bread  they  have  not  earned,  would  have 
been  busily  employed  and  adding  to  the  nation's  wealth  by 
earning  each  day  more  than  they  consume.  A  gradual 
decline  in  prices  was  inevitable,  but  it  would  not  have  de 
stroyed  confidence  and  suspended  production,  and  with 
immensely  increased  production,  both  agricultural  and 
manufacturing,  there  would  have  been  no  cry  of  a  "  glut 
in  the  market."  The  people  of  the  South,  whose  agricul 
tural  stock  and  implements,  furniture  and  apparel,  were 
exhausted  during  the  war,  would  have  been  supplying 
their  wants  by  the  sale  of  the  results  of  their  industry. 
Under  the  influence  of  northern  capital  and  enterprise 
water-power  that  now  runs  to  waste  through  cotton  fields 
would  have  been  moving  spindles  and  looms.  Forges, 
furnaces,  and  rolling-mills  such  as  those  the  war  developed 
at  Chattanooga,  Atlanta,  Lynchburg,  and  other  points, 
would  be  in  profitable  operation,  and  by  supplying  mer 
chantable  iron  diminishing  our  dependence  upon  England 
and  keeping  down  that  balance  of  trade  which  with  the 
interest  on  our  bonds  held  abroad  must  prevent  the  re 
sumption  of  specie  payments  as  long  as  we  continue  the 
"  heroic  "  treatment  of  sacrificing  all  other  interests  IE 
order  to  give  increased  value  to  the  hoarded  wealth  of 
the  possessors  of  "realized  riches."  An  increasing  de 
mand  for  skilled  labor  in  the  South  would  also  be  a  pow 
erful  agent  in  the  work  of  reconstruction  and  the  redemp 
tion  of  the  country  from  financial  embarrassment. 

Mr.  Chairman,  Bishop  Kingsley,  in  one  of  his  admira 
ble  letters  from  Europe,  from  Sweden,  I  think,  stated  that 
there  were  ten  million  industrious  people  in  Europe  eager 
to  leave  their  fatherlands,  cross  the  Atlantic,  and  identify 
themselves  with  us.  This  statement  seemed  to  bear  the 
aspect  of  exaggeration,  but  is  confirmed  by  the  judgment 
of  every  judicious  traveler  with  whom  I  have  conversed. 


CO.V1KACTIOX    THE    ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY.          237 

have  room  for  them  all ;  we  need  them  all,  and  could 
give  them  **  ample  room  and  verge  enough  ?'  in  which  to 
live  prosperously  could  the  navies  of  the  world  bring  them 
all  to  us  in  a  single  year.  We  need  them  on  our  vine  and 
pasture  lands  and  our  grain-fields  ;  in  our  forests,  our 
mines,  and  our  ore-beds.  We  want  the  industrial  secrets 
and  experience  they  possess,  but  which  have  not  been  in 
troduced  into  our  country.  We  need  them  to  guide  our 
magnificent  water-powers  running  to  waste,  and  so  har 
ness  them  that  they  shall  labor  for  us  as  they  speed  their 
way  to  the  sea.  But  would  they  better  their  condition  to 
come  to  us  at  this  time  ?  I  fear  not.  Most  of  them  can  live 
where  they  are,  and  are  used  to  the  ills  they  suffer  ;  but 
could  they  hope  to  prosper  as  strangers  in  a  strange  land,  in 
which  there  is  not  adequate  employment  for  the  native 
workingrnan  ;  in  which  that  most  powerful  of  productive 
agents,  the  steam-engine,  is  idle  and  powerless,  and  ma 
chinery  is  decaying  in  inaction,  because  the  Government 
arbitrarily  interferes  with  a  volume  of  currency  to  which 
all  values  had  adjusted  themselves,  and  which  as  a  me 
dium  of  exchanges  in  internal  trade  was  enhancing  the 
wealth  and  power  of  the  nation  in  a  ratio  unprecedented 
In  its  history  or  the  history  of  the  world  ? 

Sir,  it  is  in  the  power  of  Congress,  by  reanimating  the 
industry  and  restoring  the  confidence  of  the  country  before 
the  sun  of  May  shall  have  fitted  the  fields  of  the  North 
for  the  plow,  to  prepare  a  welcome  for  all  these  people  who 
may  be  able  to  come  to  us.  I  have  indicated  the  princi 
pal  measures  by  which  this  is  to  be  done.  There  are 
other  measures  suggested  to  which  I  would  gladly  allude, 
but  for  the  discussion  of  which  the  future  will  offer  more 
fitting  occasions.  I  have  no  fear  for  the  distant  future. 
There  is  nothing  in  our  condition  to  justify  a  dread  of  re 
pudiation.  We  are  not  poor  and  exhausted,  but  are  richer 
than  we  or  any  other  people  ever  were.  I  have  shown 
that  the  country  was  richer  at  the  close  of  the  war  by  a 
newly  created  productive  power  far  more  than  equal  to  the 
entire  indebtedness  created  by  the  war.  I  have  pointed  to 
the  fact  that  the  South,  now  the  home  of  freedom,  will 
under  its  inspiration  be  no  longer  a  burden  upon  the  ex 
chequer  of  the  country  for  her  postal  system  and  other 
Government  service,  as  she  has  hitherto  been,  but  will 
contribute  as  liberally  to  its  income  as  the  most  prosper 
ous  portions  of  the  North  have  done  or  will  do.  Con- 


238          CONTRACTION    THE    ROAD   TO    BANKRUPTCY. 

traction  of  the  currency  and  excessive  taxation  have  tem 
porarily  diminished  our  productive  power,  and  may  pro 
duce  a  period  of  most  unhealthy  agitation,  but  the  strife 
waging  in  our  midst  is,  as  I  have  shown,  the  offspring  of 
the  natural  desire  of  the  possessors  of  riches  to  expedite 
and  increase  their  profits.  But  we  are  not  here  to  legis 
late  for  them  beyond  the  protection  of  their  just  rights. 
Our  charge  is  far  nobler  than  that ;  it  is  the  welfare  of  a 
great,  intelligent  and  enterprising  people.  Justice  to  all 
will  injure  none,  and  by  laboring  to  promote  the  welfare 
of  the  poor  and  lowly  we  will  do  most  to  protect  the  pro 
perty  and  guaranty  the  rights  of  those  whose  estates  are 
largest.  Were  it  in  our  power  and  within  the  scope 
of  our  functions  to  organize  a  system  of  cooperation,  or 
by  any  other  means  to  harmonize  the  conflict  between 
labor  and  capital — employer  and  employed — it  would  con 
fer  the  highest  blessing  upon  our  country  and  give  sta 
bility  to  every  interest.  There  is,  could  we  but  discover 
it,  a  solution  of  that  difficult  question,  and  let  us  hope 
that  with  our  vast  wealth,  our  immense  bodies  of  public 
land,  the  intelligence  and  enterprise  of  our  people,  we  may 
solve  the  difficult  problem,  and  by  the  happy  condition  of 
our  people  compel  the  rulers  of  the  Old  World  to  follow 
our  example  and  guaranty  to  every  citizen  of  their  coun 
tries  the  right  to  exercise  every  privilege  and  prerogative 
of  a  free  man. 


INTERNAL  KEVENUE. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
JUKE  1,  1868. 

The  House  being  in  Committee  of  the  Whole  on  the  state  of  the 
Union,  and  having  under  consideration  the  bill  (H.  R.  No.  1060) 
to  reduce  into  one  act  and  to  amend  the  laws  relating  to  internal 
taxes — 

Mr.  Kelley  said : 

Mr.  Chairman :  I  would  be  unwilling  to  trouble  the 
committee  upon  this  most  important  bill  without  more 
special  preparation  than  I  have  been  able  to  make,  were 
it  possible  for  me  to  remain  in  the  city  and  participate  in 
the  discussion  at  a  later  day.  But  the  condition  of  my 
health  requires  that  I  should  seek  repose  in  the  quiet  of 
my  home.  I  must  therefore  avail  myself  of  the  present 
opportunity  to  offer  some  general  suggestions,  the  perti 
nence  and  importance  of  which  will,  I  hope,  justify  the 
seeming  temerity  of  following  the  elaborate  and  well- 
digested  remarks  of  the  able  chairman  of  the  Committee 
of  Ways  and  Means  in  an  extempore  discussion  of  the 
general  character  of  the  bill. 

First,  permit  me  to  thank  the  Committee  of  Ways  and 
Means  for  the  method  and  industry  exhibited  in  the  pre 
paration  of  this  bill.  They  have  done  a  great  work  for 
the  country  in  reducing  to  order  and  system  the  internal 
revenue  laws.  And  I  hope  that  before  Congress  rises 
their  bill  will,  with  such  amendments  as  the  Committee 
of  the  Whole  and  the  House  may  determine  to  make,  be 
adopted.  It  will  be  a  great  relief  to  the  industry  and 
enterprise  of  the  country,  and  produce  a  great  improvement 
in  the  morals  of  the  people.  Our  law  is  now  in  such 
a  condition  that  it  is  a  fountain  of  demoralization.  The 
revenue  service  is  becoming  discreditable,  and  honorable 
men  dislike  to  admit  that  they  belong  to  it.  Many 
of  the  taxes  it  imposes  are  worse  than  injudicious; 
and  that  on  distilled  spirits  has  been  demonstrated  to 
be  not  only  excessive  but  unnatural.  It  is  not  only  nut 

239 


24:0  INTERNAL    REVENUE. 

adapted  to  the  condition  of  our  county,  which  is  too 
broad  for  the  surveillance  of  a  metropolitan  police, 
but  is  in  entire  disregard  of  the  infirmities  of  average 
human  nature.  The  wisest  prayer  uttered  by  men  is  that 
they  may  not  be  led  into  temptation  !  But  our  Govern 
ment  has  overwhelmed  its  agents  by  subjecting  them  to 
the  almost  irresistible  temptations  the  whisky  ring  is  able 
to  present  under  existing  laws. 

Few  well-informed  men  will  assert  that  much  less  than 
one  hundred  million  gallons  of  whisky  have  been  dis 
tilled  in  this  country  during  the  last  year.  The  legal  tax 
on  this  amount  would  be  $200,000,000.  Yet  our  receipts 
have  been  only  about  thirteen  million  dollars,  as  we  havo 
just  been  told  by  the  chairman  of  the  Committee  of  Ways 
and  Means,  [Mr.  Schenck,]  to  whom  I  tender  my  thanks 
for  his  able  exposition  of  the  provisions  of  the  bill  and 
the  condition  of  the  internal  revenue  service.  Last  year 
more  than  twenty-nine  million  dollars  were  collected  from 
whisky — this  year,  less  than  one  half  of  that  sum,  and  by 
the  collection  of  this  insignificant  amount  we  have  enabled 
swindlers  to  extract  from  the  honest  consumers  of  the 
country  not  less  than  $100,000,000. 

And  yet  those  to  whom  the  execution  of  the  laws  for  the 
collection  of  this  tax  is  confided  are  sealed  and  bound  by 
oaths  at  all  points,  and  there  is  not  one  of  our  revenue 
officers  who  has  connived  at  any  part  of  this  immense  and 
wide-spread  robbery  of  the  Government,  who  has  not 
clothed  his  soul  with  perjury  as  with  a  garment.  We 
cannot  impose  restraints,  and  couple  them  with  tempta 
tions  which  average  men  cannot  resist,  and  enforce  our 
restraints  by  law,  one  whit  more  than  we  can  by  our 
statutes  reverse  the  laws  of  gravitation.  And  experience 
proves  that  in  this  matter  of  a  tax  of  two  dollars  per 
gallon  on  whisky  we  have  undertaken  an  experiment  not 
more  plausible  than  that  of  regulating  gravitation  or  the 
course  of  the  stars  by  statute. 

Sir,  our  legislation  has  diverted  the  production  of  dis 
tilled  spirits  from  its  natural  locality — the  grain-fields  of 
the  West  and  the  Southwest — and  concentrated  it  in  the 
cities  of  the  sea  board.  The  chairman  of  the  Committee 
of  Ways  and  Means  tells  us  that  the  frauds  are  chiefly 
perpetrated  in  Philadelphia  and  Chicago.  I  hope  they 
are;  for  I  am  told  by  the  Commissioner  of  Internal 
Revenue  that  one  house  in  Philadelphia  has,  within,  the 


INTERNAL   REVENUE.  241 

knowledge  of  the  Department,  sold  more  whisky  than  the 
aggregate  amount  for  which  the  Government  has  received 
tax  in  the  whole  State  of  Pennsylvania;  but,  differing 
from  the  chairman  of  the  committee,  he  said  that  in  this 
bad  eminence  Philadelphia  is  overshadowed  by  New  York. 
Sir,  it  is  affirmed  by  common  rumor  that  one  of  the  New 
York  agents  of  the  Revenue  Bureau,  whose  name  has 
recently  become  distinguished  in  another  connection,  has 
saved  from  his  inadequate  salary  more  than  two  million 
of  well-invested  dollars  in  the  brief  period  of  about  two 
years. 

Our  legislation  has  not  only  transferred  the  seat  of  the 
manufacture  of  whisky  and  high  wines,  but  it  has  changed 
the  substances  from  which  they  are  produced.  The  whis 
ky  of  America  is  no  longer  distilled  from  the  grain  of  our 
fields,  but  we  import,  we  buy  with  gold  from  foreign 
lands,  the  material  with  which  to  make  an  inferior  article ; 
and  the  money  which  should  go  West  for  grain  or  spirits 
is  carried  in  foreign  bottoms,  paying  freight  to  foreign 
ship-owners,  to  buy  foreign  material  from  which  to  make 
that  which,  under  a  reasonable  rate  of  tax,  would  be  made 
in  Illinois,  Wisconsin,  Kansas,  and  the  other  grain-grow 
ing  States. 

More  than  this,  sir ;  our  legislation  on  this  subject  has 
changed  the  personnel  of  the  whole  trade.  Go  into  which 
ever  of  the  cities  you  please,  and  you  will  no  longer  find 
the  names  of  the  old-established  distillers  and  rectifiers,  or 
if  you  find  their  names  you  will  also  find  that  the  personnel 
of  the  establishment  has  changed ;  and  it  has  come  to  pass 
that  a  business  requiring  large  capital  and  broad  premises 
is  in  the  hands  of  strangers,  men  who  are  unknown  to  their 
neighbors,  and  many  of  whom,  as  I  was  assured  within  a 
fortnight  by  a  distinguished  officer  of  the  revenue  depart 
ment,  would  be  engaged  in  burglary  or  highway  robbery, 
or  expiating  such  crimes  in  penitentiaries,  but  that  they 
iind  it  safer  and  vastly  more  profitable  to  deal  in  illicit 
whisky  and  swindle  the  Government  and  honest  trades 
men.  Let  gentlemen  consult  their  constituents  and  ask 
who  have  taken  the  places  of  the  honorable  men  who  years 
ago  added  to  the  wealth  of  the  community  by  their  indus 
try  and  integrity  in  the  distilling  and  rectifying  business. 
Few  gentlemen  will,  I  apprehend,  be  willing  to  exhibit 
the  names  and  aliases  of  the  men  now  engaged  in  either 
trade  in  their  respective  districts  and  endorse  the  list  as  a 
16 


242  INTERNAL   REVENUE. 

roll  of  honor.  Victims  of  black  mailing  and  illicit  but 
protected  competition,  honorable  men  have  abandoned  or 
are  preparing  to  abandon  the  business. 

By  defying  the  limitations  of  human  nature  we  have 
also  reversed  the  course  of  the  carrying  trade  in  this 
matter,  and  instead  of  whisky  coming  over  the  railroads 
from  the  West — whisky  made  from  grain  and  within 
proper  limits  nutritious — your  roads  are  freighted  west 
ward  with  whisky  distilled  from  molasses,  and  bound  to 
kill  at  forty  rods.  Were  whisky  used  only  as  a  beverage, 
I  would  not  deplore  this  fact ;  but  it  is  largely  consumed 
in  the  arts  of  general  production.  And  what  effect  is  this 
having  upon  the  general  industry  of  the  country  ?  It  is 
closing  manufactures  of  chemicals,  establishments  for  the 
production  of  perfumery,  the  manufacture  of  varnish,  and 
a  large  number  of  other  articles.  It  is  diminishing  the 
general  production  of  the  country,  and  lessening  the  wages 
of  large  classes  of  skilled  laboring  people.  Sir,  there  is 
within  my  district  one  chemical  works  which  has  been 
largely  engaged  in  the  production  among  others  of 
alcoholic  drugs,  such  as  chloroform,  and  using  alcohol  as  a 
solvent  for  ingredients  in  other  drugs,  such  as  quinine. 
From  a  small  beginning  the  gentlemen  conducting  this 
establishment  had  increased  their  consumption  of  alcohol 
to  about  one  hundred  and  forty  thousand  gallons  per 
annum.  But  being  conscientious  men,  who  are  unwilling 
to  violate  the  laws,  though  they  might  do  so  with  impunity, 
and  who  abide  by  their  pledge  to  the  Philadelphia  Drug 
Exchange  to  consume  no  alcohol  that  has  not  paid  its  tax, 
their  consumption  has  been  reduced  to  fifteen  thousand 
gallons  per  annum,  and  their  skilled  workmen  are  being 
scattered  or  earning  the  poor  wages  of  unskilled  laborers 
in  employments  to  which  they  are  unused.  But,  sir,  this 
is  not  all  the  harm  done  the  community  in  this  connection, 
for  men  who  scruple  not  to  make  contracts  with  fraudulent 
distillers  are  stocking  the  market  with  inferior  drugs, 
and  substitutes  for  the  purer  articles  my  constituents  for 
merly  produced  are  being  imported  in  foreign  bottoms 
and  paid  for  in  gold,  together  with  freight  to  foreign 
ship-owners  on  the  inferior  commodity. 

The  people  of  the  Northwest,  it  seems  to  me,  are  special 
ly  interested  in  this  question.  They  will  find  that  they 
cannot  afford  to  expel  from  their  inland  section  of  the 


INTERNAL    REVENUE.  243 

country  any  branch  of  manufactures.  They  need  the 
opportunity  to  export  their  grain  concentrated  in  the  form 
of  whisky,  high  wines,  or  other  manufactures.*  I  am  no 
Cassandra  and  they  will  not  believe  me,  but  I  tell  them 
they  are  entering  upon  a  competition  that  will  exclude 
them  from  the  markets  of  the  world,  if  they  depend  upon 
the  export  of  their  grain  in  bulk  as  food  or  mere  raw 
material.  Do  you  mark,  gentlemen  of  Missouri,  Illinois, 
and  Wisconsin,  that  California  is  loud  in  the  expression 
of  her  gratitude  for  the  fact  that  one  hundred  and  thirtv 
vessels  have  been  added  to  the  fleet  for  carrying  her  grain 
to  New  York  and  transatlantic  ports  ?  They  can  send 
grain  in  bulk  twenty-three  thousand  miles  to  the  seaboard 
of  New  England  or  Old  England  at  less  cost  for  transpor 
tation  than  you  can  send  yours  to  the  seaboard  by  rail. 
Oregon  is  groaning  under  her  crop  of  wheat,  and  her  peo 
ple  are  fearing  that  means  for  its  transportation  to  market 
may  not  be  at  hand.  But  this  distant  competition  is  not 
what  you  have  most  cause  to  dread.  The  South,  no  longer 
your  customer  for  food  for  man  and  beast,  looms  up  your 
competitor.  Her  advantages  over  you  are  manifold  as 
they  are  manifest.  She  lies  between  you  and  the  ocean. 
Her  grain  fields  are  upon  the  banks  of  navigable  rivers 
which  flow  to  the  Gulf  or  the  ocean,  and  at  or  near  the 
mouth  of  each  is  a  seaport.  From  Norfolk  around  to 
Galveston,  Texas,  the  grain  of  the  farmers  of  the  several 
States  may  be  floated  to  the  sea -board  upon  rafts  and  there 
find  shipping.  England  and  western  Europe  are  not  the 
countries  to  which  we  chiefly  export  grain  and  flour.  Our 
chief  markets  for  these  are  Central  and  South  America, 
and  the  islands  to  which  the  southern  States  are  neighbors ; 
and  I  tell  you  that  if  the  people  of  the  far  Northwest  do 
not  take  heed,  and  by  diversifying  their  industry  convert 
their  raw  materials  into  more  compact  productions,  the 
day  is  not  three  years  distant  when  their  crops  will  waste 


*  It  costs  a  bushel  of  wheat  to  carry  a  bushel  from  Minnesota  or  Kansas  to 
New  York  or  Boston  for  shipment  or  consumption.  One  bushel  of  corn  will  not 
pay  the  freight  on  another.  But  if  the  grain  be  concentrated  into  alcohol,  four 
bushels  will  pay  the  transportation  on  from  sixteen  to  twenty.  If  shipped  as 
grain,  that  is  the  end  of  it  to  the  farmer;  but  if  it  be  distilled  he  not  only 
reduces  the  cost  of  transportation,  but  raises  a  crop  of  hogs,  and  has  manure 
with  which  to  replenish  his  acres  exhausted  by  successive  crops  of  corn  or  wheat. 
Before  the  tax  was  put  on  whisky  we  exported  immense  quantities  of  alcohol,  to 
the  great  advantage  of  farmers.  Now  we  scarcely  export  any.  The  repeal  of  the 
tax  on  spirits  would  revive  this  branch  of  our  foreign  commerce. 


24:4  INTERNAL    REVENUE. 

in  the  fields  for  the  want  of  a  market  to  which  they  will 
pay  the  cost  of  transportation.* 

These  may  seem  to  be  idle  statements.  But  you,  gentle 
men  from  the  upper  Mississippi  and  the  Missouri,  know 
that  arrangements  are  making  for  carrying  your  grain  in 
barges  to  New  Orleans  for  shipment  thence.  The  rivers 
of  the  South  are  never  ice  bound  as  yours  are  through  a  long 
winter.  Sir,  the  ablest  pamphlet  upon  the  resources  of  this 
country  I  have  read  in  many  years  is  that  from  the  pen  of 
Hon.  John  B.  Kobertson,  of  Louisiana,  who  tells  the  people 
of  that  State  that  on  four  million  acres  of  her  soil  which 
are  yet  unbroken  by  the  plow  experiment  has  demonstrated 
the  fact  that  sixty  bushels  of  wheat  to  the  acre  may  be 
raised — sixty  bushels  of  southern  wheat  that  will  bear 
transportation  through  the  tropics,  as  spring-sown  northern 
wheat  will  not.  Gentlemen  laugh  and  shake  their  heads  ; 
but  when  I  tell  them  that  six  hundred  bushels  of  sweet 
potatoes  to  the  acre  is  in  that  region  not  more  than  a  fair 
average  crop,  they  may  imagine  that  the  land  is  somewhat 
more  fertile  than  that  they  have  been  accustomed  to  man 
age.  Seven  hundred  bushels  of  that  esculent  are  frequently 
produced  from  an  acre.  But  if  each  acre  will  yield  but 
twenty  bushels  of  wheat  near  a  seaport,  the  competition 
will  be  disastrous  to  the  grain-grower  of  the  remote  inte 
rior.  But,  sir,  I  have  wandered  into  a  digression,  but 
shall  esteem  myself  fortunate  in  having  rendered  the  coun 
try  a  service  if  some  few  gentlemen  note  and  ponder  the 
facts  I  have  suggested.  To  return  to  the  subject — I  say  to 
gentlemen  that  they  need  the  distillery  and  rectifying 
establishment,  that  whisky,  high  wines,  lard  and  oil,  rather 
than  grain  in  bulk,  shall  seek  a  market  from  their  region. 
It  will  be  better  for  all  if  we  of  the  East  consume  your 
productions  than  it  can  be  if  your  constituents  are  to  con 
tinue  to  consume  whisky  distilled  in  enlarged  tea  and 
coffee-pots  in  cellars  and  garrets  from  imported  molasses. 

Entertaining  the  views  I  have  expressed,  I  rejoiced  to 
hear  the  chairman  of  the  Committee  of  Ways  and  Means 
announce  the  fact  that  the  tax  of  two  dollars  had  been  but 


*  The  recent  Franco-German  Avar  and  the  reduction  of  the  California  wheat 
crop  fifty  per  cent,  by  drought,  have  probably  prevented  the  fulfilment  of  this 
prediction ;  but  they  have  not  sufficed  to  put  up  the  price  of  grain.  War  and 
drought  are  not  adequate  guarantees  for  a  steady  market  for  the  grain  crops  of 
this  country ;  nothing  but  a  wide  diversification  of  the  industries  of  the  West 
will  avert  the  ruin  of  the  grain-growers  of  that  section. 


INTERNAL    REVENUE.  245 

nominally  retained,  and  express  the  hope  that  the  House 
would  not  sustain  it.  But,  Mr.  Chairman,  he  proposes  in 
the  name  of  the  committee  that  the  tax  shall  be  fixed  at 
seventy-five  cents.  It  is  an  immense  reduction,  but  it  does 
not  go  quite  low  enough  to  check  the  fraud  or  to  restore 
this  important  trade  to  its  natural  channels.  While  sick  at 
my  home  last  week,  I  took  the  liberty  of  inviting  to  my 
bedside  some  of  the  best  distillers  and  chemists  of  Phila 
delphia  ;  separately  and  apart  as  they  came  I  interro 
gated  them  as  to  the  cost  of  molasses  whisky  and  the  point 
at  which  the  tax  might  safely  be  placed  ;  and  there  was 
unanimity  among  them  in  saying  that  at  seventy-five  cents 
molasses  whisky  could  in  the  hands  of  men  with  some 
capital,  incur  the  risks  of  the  law,  and  make  a  fair  profit. 
The  reduction  would  doubtless  diminish  the  production  of 
whisky  from  molasses  and  thus  reduce  the  price  of  molasses 
to  such  a  point  as  to  enable  skilful  men  to  operate  with  the 
certainty  of  large  gains.  They  also  agreed  that  at  sixty 
cents  the  ground  would  be  debatable,  but  if  Congress 
wanted  to  shut  molasses  whiskey  out  from  competition  and 
to  contend  only  with  such  fraud  as  might  be  effected  at 
regular  distilleries,  and  rectifying  establishments,  the  tax 
should  be  put  at  the  maximum  of  fifty  cents ;  and  that 
every  cent  below  that  until  it  reached  twenty-five  would 
be  a  guard  to  the  revenue,  an  additional  guard  thrown  round 
the  revenue  and  a  diminution  of  the  temptation  which  the 
Government  is  now  offering  for  perjury,  conspiracy,  and 
fraud.  I  hope,  therefore,  the  tax  will  be  reduced  to  at 
most  fifty  cents ;  and  if  I  am  able  to  be  in  my  seat  and 
find  my  vote  will  be  effective  in  bringing  it  to  forty  cents, 
I  shall  cast  it  with  the  belief  that  while  the  change  will 
save  the  revenues  of  the  Government,  it  will  also  save 
the  morals  of  the  people  by  diminishing  the  temptations 
to  which  they  are  subjected. 

I  desire  to  say,  Mr.  Chairman,  that  when  I  feared  that 
two  dollars  might  be  adhered  to  by  the  committee  as  the 
tax,  and  that  the  industries  of  the  country  would  be 
assessed  $200,000,000  in  order  that  the  infamous  "  whisky 
ring  "  might  continue  to  riot  in  fat  living  and  amass  colos 
sal  fortunes,  and  that  the  Government,  except  in  special 
taxes,  as  provided  for  in  the  bill,  would  receive  no  more 
revenue  from  this  source  than  it  has  been  getting,  I  was  of 
the  opinion  that  the  rates  proposed  in  the  bill  were  inor 
dinate.  The  estimates,  as  we  get  them  from  the  present 


246  INTERNAL   REVENUE. 

Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  have  always  been  vastly  in  ex 
cess  of  expenditures,  and  vastly  below  the  actual  receipts 
of  revenue.  The  Secretary's  estimates  have  not  been  can 
did.  Under  the  pretence  of  a  desire  to  extinguish  the 
principal  of  the  debt  it  has  seemed  to  be  his  policy  to  re 
duce  the  rewards  of  labor  and  prevent  the  development 
of  the  natural  wealth  of  the  country.  Misled  by  his  false 
estimates,  at  fault  hundreds  'of  millions  of  dollars  each 
year,  we  have  burdened  the  industry  and  restrained  the 
progress  of  the  country.  I  am  unwilling  to  be  longer  thus 
deluded  by  this  systematic  misrepresentation.  For  my  own 
part  I  am  determined  to  vote  for  the  lowest  possible  amount 
of  taxation  that  will  provide  with  certainty  for  the  pay 
ment  of  the  current  expenses  of  the  Government  and  the 
interest  on  the  public  debt. 

I  find  in  the  report  of  the  Special  Commissioner  of 
Revenue,  Mr.  "Wells,  made  in  January,  1868,  a  passage 
which  I  shall  read  as  illustrative  of  the  truth  of  my  asser 
tion  and  the  correctness  of  my  theory  : 

"  That  the  United  States  is  the  only  one  of  the  leading  nations  of 
the  world  which  is  at  present  materially  diminishing  its  debt  and  re 
ducing  its  taxes  ;  and  the  only  one,  moreover,  which  offers  any  sub 
stantial  evidence  of  its  ability  to  pay  its  debt  within  any  definite 
period,  or  even  anticipates  the  probability  of  any  such  occurrence. 
In  proof  of  which  we  submit  the  following  statements  and  sta 
tistics  : 

"The  figures  already  presented  demonstrate  that  the  United 
States,  from  the  31st  of  August,  1865,  to  the  31st  October,  1867, 
substantially  reduced  its  liabilities  by  the  sum  of  over  two  hundred 
arid  sixty-six  million  dollars,  or  at  an  average  rate  of  over  ten  mil 
lions  per  month  for  the  whole  included  period ;  and  that  during  the 
year  ending  June  30,  1867,  taxation  was  reduced  by  law  to  an  esti 
mated  amount  of  from  eighty  to  one  hunded  million  dollars  per 
annum." 

Sir,  the  Commissioner  also  informs  us  that  our  revenues 
do  not  diminish  proportionately  with  the  reduction  of  tax 
ation. 

After  presenting  a  tabular  statement  of  the  revenues  of 
the  Government  for  the  years  1866  and  1867,  he  says  : 

"A  comparison  of  the  figures  above  presented  indicates  a  falling 
off  in  the  receipts  of  internal  revenue  for  the  fiscal  year  1867,  as 
compared  with  those  of  1866,  $44,986.509.  Such  a  falling  oft0,  how 
ever,  is  apparent  and  not  real,  as  will  be  evident  when  the  great  re 
duction  of  internal  revenue  taxes,  made  by  Congress  during  the 
last  fiscal  year,  is  taken  into  the  account.  To  what  extent  this  re 
duction  has  actually  amounted  cannot  be  precisely  stated,  but  the 


INTERNAL   REVENUE.  247 

lz*x,,'S  abated  or  repealed  at  the  first  session  of  the  Thirty-Ninth 
Congress  were  estimated  as  sufficient  to  occasion  an  annual  loss  of 
revenue,  taking  the  returns  of  the  preceding  fiscal  year  as  a  prece 
dent,  of  about  sixty  million  dollars ;  while  the  further  abatement  at 
the  second  session  of  the  same  Congress  was  likewise  estimated,  in 
cluding  the  reduction  of  the  income  tax,  at  from  thirty  to  forty 
million  dollars.  It  would,  therefore,  have  been  nothing  but  reasona 
ble  to  infer  that  the  revenues  for  the  last  fiscal  year  (1866-67)  would 
have  fallen  short  of  the  aggregate  of  the  preceding  year  (1865-66) 
by  an  amount  equal  to  the  reduction  of  the  taxes,  the  effect  of  which 
was  fully  experienced  during  the  period  referred  to  ;  which  reduction 
may  be  prudently  estimated  at  from  sixty  to  seventy  million  dol 
lars.  In  addition  to  this,  it  should  be  remembered  that  the  last 
fiscal  year  in  the  United  States  was  a  year  of  great  commercial  and 
mercantile  depression — a  year  in  which  the  crops  in  all  sections  of 
the  country  were  much  below  an  average,  and  in  which  manufactur 
ing  operations  were  extensively  interfered  with  by  disagreements 
between  employers  and  their  operatives ;  and  yet,  notwithstanding 
all  this,  the  internal  revenue  did  not  fall  off  to  an  extent  commensu 
rate  with  the  amount  of  taxes  abated  or  repealed ;  but,  on  the  con 
trary,  exhibited  a  comparative  net  gain  of  from  fifteen  to  twenty- 
five  million  dollars." 

Sir,  this  is  not  miraculous  or  even  wonderful,  for  our 
country  is  expanding  in  resources  and  taxable  population 
beyond  the  degree  in  which  any  country  or  people  ever 
before  expanded.  Six  hundred  miles,  said  the  gentleman 
from  New  York,  [Mr.  Brooks,]  into  the  Indian  territory 
your  Pacific  railroad  now  runs.  Yes,  sir  ;  in  the  midst  of 
what  but  last  year  were  plains  and  hills,  to  which  civiliza 
tion  was  a  stranger,  is  now  the  flourishing  city  of  Cheyenne, 
with  its  tax-paying  population  thriving  and  prospering, 
and  along  the  whole  six  hundred  miles  of  that  road  be 
yond  the  infant  city  of  Omaha  are  people  who,  two  years 
ago,  were  citizens  of  other  lands  or  among  the  landless 
laborers  of  this  country,  who  this  year  in  their  new  and 
independent  homes,  will  contribute  to  the  revenues  of  the 
country  through  the  various  departments  of  the  internal 
tax  law  and  by  the  generous  consumption  of  dutiable 
goods. 

"  Three-fifths  of  all  other  persons,"  is  the  language  with 
which  the  Constitution  refers  to  four  million  of  our  peo 
ple — those  four  millions  who  hitherto  lived  without  the 
use  of  money,  and  were  habitually  clad  in  such  garments 
as  are  given  the  pauper  and  prisoner,  where  these  unfor 
tunates  receive  least  sympathy — to-day  walk  erect  in  man 
hood  and  womanhood.  They  handle  money  which  their 
labor  earns.  They  occupy  homes.  Many  thousands  of 
them  own  lands,  and  standing  up  under  their  own  vine  and 


248  INTERNAL    REVENUE. 

figtree  acknowledging  no  man  as  master,  and  asking  no 
man  to  supply  their  wants,  they  contribute  to  the  revenues 
of  the  Government.  Four  million  additional  consumers  of 
taxable  and  dutiable  goods.  They  are  using  the  matches 
which  pay  the  Government  a  penny  a  box;  and  no 
longer  going  barefoot  they  contribute  to  the  income  of  the 
Government  when  they  buy  the  blacking  with  which  to 
polish  their  boots.  And,  sir,  there  are  another  four  million 
dwelling  among  them,  the  poor  whites  of  the  South,  who 
were  as  innocent  as  they  of  matches  and  blacking,  and  im 
ported  silks  or  ribbons,  but  by  consuming  which  they  now, 
or  soon  will,  contribute  to  the  support  of  the  Government 
which  has  enfranchised  them  also. 

Three  hundred  thousand  immigrants  a  year  are  coming 
in  steady  flowing  streams  to  swell  the  taxable  resources  of 
the  country !  Eight  million  of  people  elevated  from  a 
condition  little  above  that  of  the  brute  into  tax-paying 
and  dutiable  goods-consuming  people !  And  can  we  in 
view  of  these  facts  estimate  the  future  from  data  furnished 
by  the  past?  No,  sir,  we  cannot  from  any  one  year  cal 
culate  the  resources  of  the  country  in  the  next,  unless  we 
impose  upon  our  industry  such  burdens  as  will  prevent  its 
profitable  employment,  check  immigration,  and  restrain  the 
development  of  our  wondrously  varied  resources. 

Three  years  ago  the  vast  coal-beds  of  the  West,  under 
lying  an  area  of  one  hundred  and  twenty-six  thousand 
square  miles  ;  embracing  a  part  of  Kentucky,  five  thousand 
miles  ;  a  part  of  Indiana,  fifteen  thousand ;  the  greater 
part  of  Illinois,  thirty -five  thousand  ;  and  stretching  under 
the  Mississippi  river  and  underlying  nearly  the  whole 
State  of  Missouri  and  a  large  part  of  Kansas,  together  with 
that  other  wonderful  coal  formation  additional  to  those  to 
which  I  have  referred,  and  separated  from  them  by  a  narrow 
rocky  strata,  which  underlies  nearly  the  whole  State  of 
Iowa,  were  scarcely  recognized  except  at  Covington,  Ken 
tucky,  as  among  the  material  resources  of  the  country.* 
But  the  ore  of  Iron  Mountain,  in  Missouri,  as  I  have  here- 


*  As  an  illustration  of  the  power  for  varied  industries  these  vast  deposits  of 
coal  offer  to  the  West,  I  may  mention  the  fact  that  three  tons  of  coal  driving  a 
steam-engine  represent  the  labor  power  of  a  man  for  his  lifetime.  Richard 
Garsed,  Esq.,  of  Frankford,  Pa.,  manufactures,  in  every  day  of  ten  hours, 
88,00(1  mi  leu  of  cotton  thread — obtaining  from  neven  tons  of  coal  the  necessary 
power.  Supposing  it  possible  for  such  quality  of  thread  to  be  made  by  hand,  it 
would  require  the  labor  of  70,000  women  during  the  same  time  to  accomplish  this 
work. 


INTERNAL    REVENUE.  249 

tofore  suggested  to  the  House,  is  now  carried  on  trains  to 
the  interior  of  Indiana,  where,  by  the  use  of  native  coal, 
purer  than  has  been  known  on  the  other  side  of  the  Atlan 
tic,  purer  than  I  had  ever  seen  before,  it  is  being  converted 
into  every  form  of  utility  to  which  iron  may  be  applied, 
and  supplying  the  "West  with  better  and  cheaper  iron 
and  steel  than  it  has  hitherto  been  able  to  purchase  ; 
and  the  train  that  brings  the  rich  ore  to  Indiana  carries 
back  to  Missouri  coal  superior  even  to  that  of  the  Big 
Muddy,  thus  demonstrating  the  possibility  of  building  up 
at  either  point  an  iron  and  steel  industry  before  which 
those  of  England,  France,  Belgium,  and  even  Prussia, 
justly  famous  as  is  her  Krupp,  will  sink  into  comparative 
insignificance.  The  true  policy  of  this  country,  in  view 
of  its  vast  resources,  and  of  the  rapid  and  steady  aggrega 
tion  and  exaltation  of  its  people,  is  to  reduce  internal 
taxation  to  the  minimum,  to  relieve  its  industry  and 
its  resources  from  every  burden  possible,  to  see  to  it  that 
all  just  demands  on  the  Government  are  amply  provided 
for,  and  to  leave  the  principal  of  the  debt  to  be  liquidated 
when  the  people  of  the  South  shall  have  recovered  from 
the  ravages  of  war,  and  when,  enlightened  by  experience, 
the  Northwest  shall  have  adjusted  itself  to  the  competition 
it  is  to  endure  from  the  grain-growing  capacity  of  the 
South,  and  the  determination  of  her  people  to  revenge 
themselves  so  far  as  they  can  upon  their  conquerors  by 
growing  it  and  monopolizing  the  markets  open  to  Ameri 
can  grain.  I  hope,  therefore,  that  though  I  may  be  absent 
during  the  consideration  of  this  bill,  others  will  see  to  it 
that  every  tax  which  touches  the  industry  of  the  coun 
try  or  annoys  the  people  by  its  impertinent  exaction,  that 
can  with  safety  be  reduced,  will  be. 

And  in  this  connnection  I  turn  to  schedule  A,  which 
imposes  a  tax  upon  a  $300  carriage,  upon  a  gold  watch, 
upon  the  piano  you  have  provided  for  your  daughter ;  and 
which  requires  citizens  to  account  for  the  spoons  and  forks 
in  use  in  their  houses,  whether  given  to  them  as  wedding 
presents  or  preserved  as  a  slight  memorial  of  the  fact  that 
they  had  remote  ancestors. 

A  Member.     It  is  not  taxed  unless  kept  for  use. 

Mr.  Kelley.  When  it  comes  into  use  it  becomes  taxable. 
After  the  baby  is  born  the  pap-spoon  is  taxable,  until  then 
it  may,  as  a  present,  escape  the  tax  collector's  inquisition. 
The  whole  amount  of  taxes  collected  under  schedule  A 


250  INTERNAL    EEVENUE. 

during  the  last  year,  when  it  yielded  more  than  ever  be 
fore,  was  $2,116,000.  Now,  the  chairman  of  the  commit 
tee  has  shown  you  that  under  his  bill  at  the  very  low 
est  possible  estimate  you  are  to  have  a  surplus  of  $46,000,- 
000.  Hitherto  you  were  to  have  no  surplus,  and  you 
raised  an  excess  of  $120,000,000  each  year.  Start  out 
with  aiming  at  $46,000,000  of  surplus,  and  during  the  year 
with  the  incoming  tide  of  prosperity  you  will  find  that  you 
have  needlessly  assessed  $146,000,000  of  taxes.  T  will 
not  enumerate  the  provisions  of  the  section  to  which  I  refer. 
You  will  find  them  embraced  in  section  one  hundred  and 
sixteen,  on  page  171. 

I  have  been  told  by  collectors  of  internal  revenue  that 
more  penalties  are  incurred  by  neglect  of  the  tax  on 
gold  watches  than  on  any  other  article.  More  persons  are 
made  to  feel  that  your  laws  inflict  unjust  penalties  by  this 
tax  than  by  any  other.  I  have  heard  of  an  instance 
of  a  conscientious  widow  who,  learning  subsequent  to 
the  day  on  which  it  should  have  been  paid,  that  there 
was  such  a  tax,  went  and  reported  that  she  had  five 
daughters,  each  of  whom  had  a  gold  watch,  and  had  a 
special  penalty  in  addition  to  the  tax  imposed  on  each  by 
reason  of  her  conscientiousness.  The  taxes  are  frequently 
collected  in  a  manner  to  make  the  law  as  odious  as  possi 
ble  ;  and  if  a  Eepublican,  or  the  wife  or  daughter  of  a 
Eepublican  complains,  the  answer  is,  "  My  party  is  not  re 
sponsible  for  it ;  we  did  not  make  the  law.  Why  do  you 
not  get  the  Republicans  to  remedy  the  annoyance  of  which 
you  complain  ?"  And  I  trust  the  Eepublican  majority  in 
this  Congress  will  remove  all  these  almost  fruitless  but 
annoying  taxes.  Sir,  all  the  objects  named  in  schedule  A 
have  in  no  one  year  paid  one  per  cent,  of  the  revenue ; 
they  have  never  reached  more  than  eight-tenths  of  one  per 
cent,  of  the  income  of  the  Government.  In  the  report  of 
the  Commissioner  of  Internal  Eevenue,  to  which  I  have 
referred,  you  will  find  the  figures  set  out,  and  the  nearest 
they  have  ever  come  was  seven  hundred'  and  ninety-six 
thousandths  of  one  per  cent,  of  the  annual  revenue.  Why 
make  our  taxes  so  odious  by  penetrating  inquisitorially 
into  the  secrets  of  every  maiden  lady  and  widow  in  the 
land,  and  inquiring  whether  she  can  conscientiously  swear 
that  her  old  carryall  is  not  worth  $300,  for  the  sake  of 
swelling  in  so  slight  a  degree  the  surplus  revenue  ? 

Again,  sir,  it  has  occurred  to  me  that  the  committee,  be- 


INTERNAL   REVENUE.  251 

lieving  many  of  these  taxes  to  be  inordinate,  have  hoped 
to  enforce  them  by  extreme  penalties.  Thus,  in  section 
sixty-nine  it  is  provided  : 

"  That  if  any  distiller,  rectifier,  wholesale  liquor  dealer,  com- 
pounder  of  liquors,  distiller  of  oil,  brewer,  or  manufacturer  of  tocacco 
or  cigars,  shall  omit,  neglect,  or  refuse  to  do  or  cause  to  be  done 
any  of  the  things  required  by  law  in  the  carrying  on  or  conducting 
of  his  business,  or  shall  do  anything  by  this  act  prohibited,  if  there 
be  no  specific  penalty  or  punishment  imposed  by  any  other  section 
of  this  act  for  the  neglecting,  omitting,  or  refusing  to  do,  or  for  the 
doing  or  causing  to  be  done,  the  thing  required  or  prohibited,  he 
shall  pay  a  penalty  of  $1000  ;  and,  if  the  person  so  offending  be  a 
distiller,  rectifier,  wholesale  liquor  dealer,  or  compounder  of  liquors,  all 
distilled  spirits  or  liquors  owned  by  him,  or  in  which  he  has  any  inter 
est  as  owner,  if  he  be  a  distiller  of  oil,  all  oil  found  in  his  distillery, 
and  if  he  be  a  manufacturer  of  tobacco  or  cigars,  all  tobacco  or 
cigars  found  in  his  manufactory,  shall  be  forfeited  to  the  United 
States." 

What,  sir !  if  his  youngest  errand  boy  commits  an  error 
of  that  kind,  if  some  of  his  servants  be  suborned,  if  any 
of  his  agents  do  what  ought  not  to  be  done,  or  omit  to  do 
what  the  law  requires,  are  you  to  forfeit  his  whole  stock  ? 
I  trust  the  committee  will  at  least  insert  the  words  "  wil 
fully  and  designedly,"  so  that  for  a  mere  accident  the  entire 
stock  and  business  of  a  man  may  not  be  confiscated,  or  he 
be  subjected  to  litigation. 

Did  my  strength  permit  I  would  gladly  consider  somo 
other  provisions  of  the  bill.  But,  sir,  I  have  presented  the 
main  views  that  impress  me.  They  are,  in  the  first  place, 
that  the  bill,  even  as  modified  bv  the  suggestions  of  the 
chairman  of  the  Committee  of  Ways  and  Means,  and  the 
reduction  of  the  tax  on  whisky  to  seventy-five  cents, 
offers  a  bribe  of  many  million  dollars  to  a  ring  organized 
throughout  the  country  and  knowing  its  men  in  every 
city,  county,  and  State — a  bribe  of  enormous  amount  to 
tempt  bad  men  to  perjury,  conspiracy,  and  fraud  ;  and  I 
trust  that  the  tax  will  be  reduced  to  a  point  which  will 
make  it  certain  that  molasses  whisky  cannot  be  made  and 
sent  to  the  West  with  profit. 

Preclude  the  use  of  that  imported  ingredient,  which  may 
be  distilled  in  any  cellar  or  attic,  and  compel  distillers  to 
use  grain,  and  you  will  secure  to  the  officers  of  the  reve 
nue  a  chance  to  discover  frauds,  punish  swindlers,  and  con 
fiscate  illegal  goods.  And  I  ask  gentlemen  while  consid 
ering  this  bill  to  carry  with  them  the  proposition  that  the 
true  standard  of  estimate  for  the  receipts  of  the  next  year, 


252  INTERNAL    KEVENUE. 

and  the  true  object  at  which  to  aim  in  making  assessments, 
is  simply  to  provide  for  the  payment  of  the  interest  on  the 
public  debt  and  the  current  expenses.  They  may  be  as 
sured  that  if  they  will  make  ample  provision  for  these  ob 
jects,  they  will  provide  the  means  to  pay  from  forty  to 
seventy  millions  of  the  principal  of  the  public  debt,  as  our 
receipts  always  largely  exceed  the  Commissioner's  and 
Secretary's  estimates. 

I  have  not  the  strength  to  stand  while  I  analyze  the 
figures  I  noted  as  they  fell  from  the  lips  of  the  chairman 
of  the  committee.  If  I  had  I  could,  1  think,  make  a  per 
fect  demonstration  of  my  proposition  from  the  materials  he 
furnished.  But,  thanking  the  members  of  the  commit 
tee  for  the  attention  they  have  given  me,  I  leave  the 
work  in  their  hands  with  confidence  that  it  will  be  faith 
fully  done. 


REPORT   OF   SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER   OF  THE 
REVENUE. 

REMARKS  DELIVEKED  IN  THE   HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTA 
TIVES,  FEBRUARY  4,  1869. 

The  House  being  in  Committee  of  the  Whole  on  the  state  of  the 
Union  on  the  President's  annual  message — 

Mr.  Kelley  said  : 

Mr.  Chairman:  On  the  19th  of  January,  the  Committee 
on  Printing  submitted  a  resolution  to  J)rint  twenty  thou 
sand  copies  of  the  report  of  the  Special  Commissioner  of 
the  Revenue  for  the  use  of  the  House,  and  one  thousand 
bound  copies  for  the  use  of  the  Treasury  Department,  and 
though  I  had  no  hope  of  preventing  its  adoption,  I  felt 
constrained  to  resist  the  motion  and  submit  the  reasons 
which  impelled  me  thereto  as  fully  as  I  could  in  the  brief 
time  allowed  me  by  the  courtesy  of  the  gentleman  from 
New  Hampshire,  [Mr.  Ela,]  who  presented  the  resolution. 
I  could  not  hope  that  the  House  would  refuse  to  print  a 
report  the  preparation  of  which  had  cost  the  Government 
so  much  money  in  the  pay  of  the  Commissioner  and  his 
clerical  assistants.  What  I  sought  to  do  was  in  some 
measure  accomplished;  it  was  to  send  with  the  report  a 
note  of  warning  to  the  country.  I  then  said : 

"  I  hope  the  resolution  reported  by  the  committee  will  not  be 
adopted.  I  do  not  think  the  report  ought  to  receive  sucli  an  en 
dorsement.  I  do  not  see  how  Congress  can  consistently  cast  it 
broadcast  over  the  country.  It  is  a  report  full  of  figures,  which  are 
so  ingeniously  selected  and  marshaled  that  one  might  suppose  it 
had  been  prepared  specially  to  show  the  pestilent  character  of  that 
most  false  and  dangerous  of  all  the  aphorisms  embodied  in  the 
English  language,  namely,  that  '  figures  cannot  lie.'  They  are  so 
culled  and  marshaled  in  this  report  as  to  lead  to  conclusions  false, 
delusive,  and  damaging  to  our  country,  and  especially  unjust  to  that 
Congress  which  has  carried  the  country  through  the  great  struggle 
from  which  she  has  just  emerged.  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  the 
figures  embodied  in  it  are  in  themselves  false ;  upon  that  point  I  do 
not  speak  now  ;  but  I  do  mean  to  say  that  they  are  so  detached 
from  their  correlatives  as  to  lead  to  conclusions  utterly  at  variance 

253 


254     KEPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE. 

with  facts   which  are  notorious   and    familiar  to  every  gentleman 
on  this  floor." 

"The  gentleman  who  is  named  in  the  report  as  having  collected 
the  statistics  and  made  the  calculations  has,  so  far  as  I  know,  done 
his  duty  fairly ;  but  the  Commissioner  who  selected  the  material  for 
this  report,  and  prepared  arid  marshaled  it,  has  not  done  so  with  a 
view  to  let  Congress  and  the  country  deduce  conclusions  from  an 
impartial  array  of  facts,  but  to  sustain  a  foregone  conclusion  and 
advocate  a  favorite  theory  of  his  own,  which  is,  in  my  judgment,  at 
variance  with  the  true  interests  of  the  country." 

Arid  again : 

"  The  thesis  of  the  report  is  that  we  have  since  1860  so  legislated 
that  while  wealth  is  accumulating  more  rapidly  than  it  ever  accumu 
lated  in  any  land  or  age,  the  poor  are  steadily  growing  poorer  and 
the  rich  richer ;  that  the  yawning  gulf  between  poverty  and  wealth 
is  ever  widening  in  this  country,  and  that  the  laboring  man  and  Ins 
family  cannot  live  as  well  upon  their  earnings  as  they  could  in  I860. 

"  The  report — and  it  is  voluminous — devotes  five  or  six  pages 
only  to  the  progress  of  wealth  and  productive  power  in  this  coun 
try,  but  they  suffice  to  show  that  it  is  with  constantly  increasing 
velocity  and  momentum.  If  it  be  true  in  that  respect,  and  the 
laboring  people  are  really  becoming  poorer  daily,  we  are  on  the  eve 
of  an  aristocracy  more  potent  than  any  that  has  preceded  it,  and 
of  a  social  condition  such  as  the  world  has  never  seen.  I  propose 
to  inquire  whether  this  startling  proposition  be  true.  The  Com 
missioner,  assuming  that  his  array  of  facts  has  established  it,  says 
on  page  21 : 

" '  It  has  been  well  said  that  there  can  be  no  true  theoretic  conclu 
sion  which  will  not  be  proved  by  the  facts  whenever  the  theory  can 
be  applied.  We  have  given  the  theory  of  the  effects  of  incon 
vertible  paper  money,  and  we  find  that  the  facts  prove  it.  The  rich 
become  richer  and  the  poor  poorer.' 

"Not  satisfied  with  this,  he  says  : 

"  '  The  aggregate  wealth  of  the  country  is  increasing,  probably,  as 
rapidly  as  at  any  former  period  ;  *  yet  it  does  not  follow  that  there 
is  the  same  increase  in  general  prosperity.  The  laborer,  especially 
he  who  has  a  large  family  to  support,  is  not  as  prosperous  as  he 
was  in  1860.  His  wages  have  not  increased  in  proportion  to  the 
increase  in  the  cost  of  his  living.  There  is,  therefore,  an  inequality 


*  In  1868  when  his  sinister  ends  required  him  to  array  the  poor  against  the 
rich,  the  workman  against  his  employer,  Commissioner  Wells  found  it  covenient 
to  make  this  truthful  admission.  But  a  year  later,  when  preparing  his  report 
for  1869,  which  was  happily  his  final  one,  he  found  it  necessary  to  array  the 
farmers  of  the  country  against  the  manufacturers,  both  workmen  and  employer?, 
he  devoted  pages  to  proving  that  the  increase  of  the  aggregate  wealth  had  been 
but  about  half  as  rapid  as  during  the  preceding  decade.  He  stated  correctly 
the  rate  of  increase  between  1850  and  1860  to  have  been  129  per  cent.,  and  fixed 
the  rate  for  the  last  decade  at  but  65  per  cent.  The  final  result  for  the  latter 
period  has  not  been  ascertained,  but  enough  is  known  to  prove  that  the  rate 
was,  notwithstanding  the  war,  equal  to  that  of  the  preceding  decade,  129  per 
cent.,  as  the  aggregate  as  far  as  ascertained  is  over  $31,000,000,000. 


REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE.     255 

in  the  distribution  of  our  annual  product  which  we  must,  in  no 
small  degree,  refer  to  artificial  causes.  This  inequality  exists  even 
among  the  working  classes  themselves.  The  single  man  or  woman, 
working  for  his  or  her  support  alone,  is  in  the  receipt  of  a  rate  of 
wages  from  which  savings  may  be  made  equal  or  greater  than  ever 
before,  especially  in  the  manufacturing  towns,  where  the  price  of 
board  is,  to  a  certain  extent,  regulated  artificially  by  the  employer.' 

And  again,  I  ask  gentlemen  to  listen  to  the  Commis 
sioner's  statement  of  the  condition  to  which  their  legisla 
tion  has  reduced  our  countrymen  : 

'"Unmarried  operatives,  therefore,  gain;  while  those  who  are 
obliged  to  support  their  own  families  in  hired  tenements  lose. 
Hence,  deposits  in  savings-banks  increase,  while  marriage  is  dis 
couraged;  and  the  forced  employment  of  young  children  is  made 
almost  a  necessity  in  order  that  the  family  may  live.'  " 

If  this  be  the  condition  of  our  country,  do  we  not,  as  I 
have  said,  perpetrate  a  great  fraud  when  we  ask  the  labor 
ing  immigrant  to  come  and  dwell  among  us  ? 

The  gentleman  from  Ohio  [Mr.  Garfield]  did  me  the 
honor  to  reply  to  me  in  a  rejoinder  which  had  been  pre 
pared  for  the  occasion,  as  appears  from  his  remark  that, 
"hearing  that  this  attack  was  to  be  made,  I  have  asked 
information  from  two  sources  in  order  to  test  the  correct 
ness  of  the  Commissioner's  position."  His  reply  would, 
I  doubt  not,  have  been  more  candid  had  it  been  prepared 
after  he  had  heard  what  I  had  to  say.  His  misrepresenta 
tion  of  my  position  was  not  intentional.  It  arose  from 
his  misconception  of  the  point  I  would  make  when  I 
should  have  an  opportunity  to  express  my  convictions. 
In  view  of  the  passages  from  my  remarks  already  quoted, 
especially  of  my  announcement  that  I  did  not  mean  to 
examine  the  question  whether  the  figures  embodied  in  the 
report  are,  in  themselves,  false,  but  did  "  mean  to  say  that 
they  are  so  detached  from  their  correlatives  as  to  lead  to 
conclusions  utterly  at  variance  with  facts  which  are  notor 
ious  and  familiar  to  every  gentleman  on  this  floor,"  he  was 
hardly  justified  in  saying  that  I  had  admitted  "in  the  first, 
place  that  the  facts  stated  are  generally  correct ;  that  the  sta 
tistics  collected  and  arranged  in  tables  are  true  and  correct 
ly  stated."  /  certainly  did  not  admit  the  truth  or  correctness 
of  that  which  the  single  purpose  of  my  remarks  was  to  deny, 
and  which  every  fact  I  presented  contradicted.  I  am  sure, 
from  the  gentleman's  well-known  character,  that  he  would 
not  have  made  this  assertion  had  his  remarks  been  pre 
pared  after  he  had  heard  me.  After  he  had  thus  charged 
me  with  admitting  all  I  had  been  denying  and  disproving, 


256     REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE. 

he  said  that  it  must  be,  then,  that  I  refuse  to  print  this  re 
port  because  its  facts  and  deductions  do  not  square  with 
my  theories  and  notions,  and  exultingly  proclaimed  my 
opposition  to  the  printing  a  most  damaging  admission.* 

I  resume  the  discussion  in  pursuance  of  a  promise  made 
when  the  fall  of  the  Speaker's  gavel  announced  the  expira 
tion  of  the  brief  time  allowed  me,  and  in  the  hope  of 
showing  by  an  array  of  facts,  many  of  which  were  not 
then  in  my  possession,  the  dangerous  fallacies  the  Com 
missioner  has  attempted  to  sustain  by  "doctored,"  "  manip 
ulated,"  "garbled,"  "marshaled,"  or  in  other  words,  art 
fully  arranged  figures.  The  correctness  of  the  figures  set 
forth  in  the  report  I  am  willing,  as  I  then  was,  to  admit 
for  argument  sake,  but  not  in  fact,  as  time  has  not  yet 
permitted  me  to  test  them  fully.  They  may  in  themselves 
be  true ;  but  there  is  a  falsehood  known  as  the  suppressio 
veri — the  statement  of  part  of  the  truth  in  such  a  manner 
as  to  produce  the  effect  of  a  positive  falsehood ;  and  of 
that  I  charge  that  the  Commissioner  has  been  guilty  in 
almost  every  part  of  his  voluminous  report.  He  who 
denies  the  existence  of  Deity,  and  in  support  of  the  denial 
quotes  the  last  four  words  of  the  exclamation  "  the  fool 
hath  said  in  his  heart,  there  is  no  God,"  as  a  complete 
sentence,  misrepresents  the  teachings  of  the  Psalmist, 
though  he  correctly  quotes  that  particular  portion  of  his 
language.  The  falsehood  is  in  the  manner  of  the  state 
ment,  and  not  in  the  thing  stated.  This  illustration  is 
not  inapplicable  to  the  document  under  consideration. 

Gentlemen  who  read  the  report  from  pages  14  to  21  in 
clusive,  will  find  an  abundant  array  of  tabular  compara 
tive  statements  which,  if  they  be  true  and  in  themselves 
constitute  the  whole  truth,  prove  most  adequately  its 
assertion : 

"  That  for  the  year  1867,  and  for  the  first  half  of  1868,  the  aver 
age  increase  of  all  the  elements  which  constitute  the  food,  clothing, 
and  shelter  of  a  family  has  been  about  seventy-eight  per  cent.,  as 
compared  with  the  standard  prices  of  1860-61." 

And  that  the  rate  of  increase  in  wages  for  the  year  1867 
as  compared  with  1860-61.  was  but  as  follows: 

*  For  an  illustration  of  the  ludicrous  absurdity  of  some  of  Mr.  Wells'  posi 
tions  and  fabricated  facts,  which  Mr.  Garfield  hastened  to  defend  with  such 
zeal,  readers  are  referred  to  the  tables  of  weekly  earnings  and  expenditures  of 
families,  quoted  from  the  Commissioner's  report  on  pages  271,  272.  They  show 
the.  wonderful  dexterity  with  which  Mr.  Wells  subordinates  the  most  palpable 
facts  to  the  theories  he  embraced  during  his  visit  to  England. 


REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE.     257 

"For  unskilled  mechanical  labor,  fifty  per  cent.;  for  skilled 
mechanical  labor,  sixty  per  cent." 

I  pause  for  a  moment  to  deny  the  correctness  of  these 
statements,  and  to  assert  that  the  price  of  the  necessaries 
of  life  enumerated  in  these  tables  are,  on  an  average,  not 
more  than  fifty  per  cent,  higher  than  in  1860,  while  labor 
is  now  immeasurably  more  fully  employed  at  an  advance 
of  from  eighty  to  one  hundred  per  cent,  over  the  wages 
of  that  year.     But  this  is  a  point  about  which  ingenuity 
may  cavil,  and  is  not  essential  to  the  support  of  my  argu 
ment.      To  give  Mr.  Wells'  figures  any  practical   value 
they  should   have  been  accompanied  by  another  column 
for  each  year,  in  which  should  have  been  stated  the  num 
ber  of  working  people  employed  in   each  of  the  several 
branches  of  business  referred  to,  and  the  number  who, 
though  skilled  workmen  at  those  branches,  were  unable  to 
obtain  employment  of  any  kind  by  which  to  earn  wages. 
The   omission   of    these   elements   from   the    calculation 
vitiates  the  Commissioner's  figures,  even  though  they  are 
in  themselves  true,  and  conceals  the  fraud  this  report  was 
intended  to   perpetrate.      Let  the  gentleman  from   Ohio 
glorify  the  memory  of  1860   as  he  may,   I   confidently 
reiterate  what  I  said  in  the  former  discussion : 

"  Eighteen  hundred  and  sixty  and  1861,  and  from  1857  to  the 
autumn  of  the  latter  year,  was  one  of  the  darkest  periods  ever  seen 
by  the  laboring  people  of  America.  Not  one  out  of  five  of  the 
skilled  workmen  of  the  country  was  steadily  employed.  In  Phila 
delphia,  when  they  wanted  to  build  a  street  railroad  they  advertised 
for  two  hundred  and  fifty  hands  at  sixty  cents  a  day,  and  more  than 
five  thousand  offered,  a  majority  of  whom  were  skilled  artizans  who 
could  find  no  other  employment.  In  the  neighborhood  of  one  of  the 
establishments,  the  statistics  of  which  go  into  this  report,  a  rolling- 
mill,  the  number  of  unemployed  men  was  so  great  that  the  county 
authorities,  to  save  its  skilled  workmen  from  open  pauperism,  deter 
mined  to  build  a  turnpike,  and  experienced  hands  from  rolling-mills 
were  employed  at  breaking  stone  and  road-making  at  fifty  cents  a 
day  rather  than  become  paupers.  For  the  comparatively  few  who 
had  employment  the  wages  are,  I  assume,  honestly  given  in  the 
report ;  but  of  the  many  who  were  picking  up  a  precarious  living  by 
getting  an  occasional  day's  work  at  half  wages  or  quarter  wages  no 
account  is  taken ;  and  thus  facts  that  may  be  true  in  themselves,  by 
being  separated  from  those  which  would  have  explained  and  inter 
preted  them,  are  made  to  libel  our  country  and  the  Congress  that 
curried  it  through  the  war. 

"  Let  me  in  this  connection  bring  the  attention  of  gentlemen  to 
some  facts : 

II  Look  at  the  palatial  buildings  erected  in  this  city  during  the 
laat  year  arid  the  comfortable  dwellings  for  mechanics  and  laborers, 

17 


258     REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE, 

How  many  of  them  there  are  you  have  all  seen.  They  are  built  by 
squares  and  blocks.  I  have  endeavored  to  ascertain  how  many 
were  built  in  1860,  and  can  hear  of  but  four  dwelling  houses  built  in 
Washington  in  that  'year.  In  1861,  so  far  as  I  have  been  able  to 
learn,  but  one  dwelling  house  and  one  public  school-house,  the  con 
tract  price  for  which  was  $3500,  were  erected.  Leaving  Washing 
ton,  I  go  to  to  my  own  city,  and  by  turning  to  the  report  of  the 
building  inspectors  find  that  in  1860  twenty-four  hundred  and  seventy, 
two  houses  were  built.  The  decline  had  commenced,  and  in  1861  but 
sixteen  hundred  and  seventy-three  were  built.  In  1860  we  enlarged 
five  hundred  and  eighty-eight  buildings ;  in  1861  but  two  hundred 
and  four  were  enlarged.  But  in  1868,  when  the  Commissioner  tells 
us  labor  was  not  as  prosperous  as  in  1860,  we  erected  forty-seven 
hundred  and  ninety-six  buildings  and  enlarged  twelve  hundred  and 
fifteen.  In  1868  there  was  an  active  demand  for  labor,  and  its  price 
was  high.  It  could  determine  its  own  wages.  In  1860  labor  was 
begging  employment  and  wages  were  low.  As  a  general  thing 
mechanics  had  to  accept  whatever  wages  were  offered,  though  in  a 
few  instances  favored  establishments  were  able  to  run  continuously, 
and  pay  fair  wages,  and  these  exceptional  cases  have  furnished  the 
Commissioner  data  for  what  he  announces  as  a  general  law. 

"  The  low  rate  of  wages  that  ruled  in  1860  would  have  led  a  pro 
ficient  in  political  economy  to  look  for  the  facts  I  am  now  about  to 
lay  before  you.  It  is  a  law  of  social  science  that  when  employment 
is  scarce  labor  must  accept  low  wages,  and  lose  time ;  but  when 
employment  is  quick  and  active,  labor  regulates  its  own  wages  and 
is  constantly  employed.  The  tables  presented  by  the  Commissioner 
ignore  this  law,  and  are  consequently  a  fraud  upon  Congress  and  a 
slander  upon  our  country,  the  working  people  of  which  were  never 
so  prosperous  as  now. 

"  Let  me  exhibit  some  other  comparisons  between  1860  and  1868 
which  bear  upon  the  question  at  issue.  In  that  blessed  year,  1860, 
which  the  Commissioner  eulogizes,  the  sheriff  of  Philadelphia 
received  seventeen  hundred  and  forty  writs  for  the  sale  of  real 
estate,  while  in  1868,  the  year  he  denounces  as  one  of  congressional 
wrong  and  pecuniary  depression,  the  sheriff  of  that  city  received  but 
seven  hundred  and  six  writs  for  the  sale  of  real  estate,  a  falling  off 
of  largely  more  than  fifty  per  cent.,  though  in  the  interval  there  had 
been  an  increase  of  forty  per  cent,  in  the  population,  and  vastly 
more  than  that  in  the  wealth  of  the  city." 

In  connection  with  these  statements  I  brought  to  the 
attention  of  the  House  on  that  occasion  such  figures  drawn 
from  the  reports  of  the  savings-banks  of  seven  States  as  I 
happened  to  have  at  hand.  Since  then  I  have  been  able 
to  add  to  my  collection  of  that  class  of  facts,  some  which 
I  will  proceed  to  exhibit,  I  have  the  official  statement 
of  the  total  amount  of  deposits  in  the  savings-banks  of 
Maine,  New  Hampshire,  Massachusetts,  and  Rhode  Island, 
of  the  Philadelphia  Saving-Fund  Society,  which  is  allowed 
to  receive  but  $200  from  any  one  depositor  in  a  year,  and 
of  the  savings-banks  of  the  city  of  Newark,  New  Jersey, 


KEPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE.     259 

for  1860  and  1861,  and  of  these  institutions,  and  a  third 
at  Newark,  a  dime  savings-bank,  which  has  since  come 
into  existence,  for  1867  and  1868.  J  have  also  reports 
from  other  states,  but  as  they  do  not  cover  the  four  years 
designated  they  could  not  be  embraced  in  the  table  I  have 
compiled.  That  I  have  not  been  wanting  in  diligence  in 
my  endeavors  to  procure  such  official  information  as 
would  enable  me  to  make  a  general  comparative  table  for 
these  years  will  be  attested  by  gentlemen  on  this  floor  and 
in  the  Senate,  of  whom  I  have  requested  the  names  of  the 
proper  parties  to  whom  to  apply,  and  by  Mr.  Spofford, 
the  Librarian  of  Congress,  to  whose  industry  and  courtesy 
I  am  much  indebted. 

All  the  information  obtained  shall  be  fully  presented, 
and  I  think  the  gentleman  from  Ohio,  [Mr.  Garfield,] 
though  he  may  remember  1860  as  a  pleasant  and  prosper 
ous  year,  will  be  persuaded  that  millions  of  his  country 
men  remember  it  as  a  year  of  agony,  during  which  gaunt 
want  entered  their  homes  because  the  last  dollar  of  their 
past  earnings  had  been  extorted  from  them  by  idleness 
enforced  by  a  revenue  or  free  trade  tariff. 

I  have  not  been  able  to  ascertain  the  number  of  deposi 
tors  in  all  the  institutions  to  which  I  am  referring  for  each 
year,  but  have  them  from  the  Saving-Fund  Society  of 
Philadelphia  and  the  savings-banks  of  New  Hampshire, 
Massachusetts,  and  Ehode  Island.  These  are,  however, 
sufficent  to  indicate  the  general  condition  of  the  class  of 
people  who  are  depositors  in  such  institutions,  and  whose 
alleged  relative  poverty  in  1867  Mr.  Wells  so  deplores. 
On  the  1st  day  of  January,  1860,  there  were  twenty-one 
thousand  two  hundred  and  sixty-five  depositors  in  the 
institution  at  Philadelphia,  and  on  the  1st  of  January, 
1861,  there  were  but  twelve  thousand  six  hundred  and 
sixty-two ;  and  the  total  amount  of  deposits  had  gone 
down  from  $4,083,450  to  $2,251,646,  or  little  more  than 
one  half.  In  Massachusetts,  as  an  official  statement  before 
me  shows,  the  number  of  depositors  has  fallen  off  in  but 
two  years  between  1834  and  1868,  inclusive.  In  1865  the 
total  decrease  was  one  hundred  and  twenty-eight,  an 
almost  incalculably  small  fraction  of  one  per  cent.,  but  in 
the  year  1861,  in  consequence  of  the  want  of  employment 
in  1860,  the  number  fell  off  five  thousand  and  ten,  or  two 
and  one-sixth  per  cent.,  and  the  deposits  remaining  at  the 
close  of  the  year  were  reduced  $268,797. 


260     REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE. 

The  number  of  depositors  in  the  savings-banks  of  Rhode 
Island  has  receded  in  but  one  year  between  1655  and  1868 
inclusive,  which  was  1861,  when  they  fell  off  five  hundred 
and  ninety-eight,  notwithstanding  which  the  aggregate 
deposit  increased  $119,119  33. 

The  extreme  force  of  the  depression  which,  as  the  result 
of  our  adhesion  to  free  trade  and  an  exportable  metallic 
currency,  overtook  the  country  in  1857,  and  terminated 
only  with  the  issue  of  the  currency  known  as  greenbacks, 
and  the  passage  of  the  protective  tariff  of  1861  seems  to 
have  fallen  upon  New  Hampshire  as  early  as  1858.  From 
1850  to  1868,  inclusive,  the  number  of  depositors  in 
savings-banks  of  that  State  has  decreased  in  but  two  years, 
1858  and  1866.  In  the  latter  year  the  number  of  deposi 
tors  fell  off  about  one  per  cent.,  notwithstanding  which  the 
deposits  increased  $26,265  31 ;  but  in  1858  the  depositors 
fell  off  seven  per  cent.,  or  thirteen  hundred  and  twenty- 
three,  and  the  deposits  were  reduced  $159,627  40. 

While  recounting  the  manifold  blessings  that  period 
brought  to  the  working  people  of  the  country  the  gentle 
man  from  Ohio  [Mr.  Garfield]  reminded  me  that  the  work 
ing  people  were  docile  in  that  year,  and  indulged  in  no 
strikes  either  for  higher  wages  or  against  a  reduction  of 
their  pay.  He  said : 

"  It  was  a  year  of  plenty,  of  great  increase.  I  remember,  more 
over,  that  it  was  a  year  of  light  taxes.  There  was  but  one  great 
people  on  the  face  of  the  globe  so  lightly  taxed  as  the  -American 
people  in  1860.  Now  we  are  the  most  heavily  taxed  people  except 
one,  perhaps,  on  the  face  of  the  globe ;  and  the  weight  of  nearly  all 
our  taxes  falls  at  last  on  the  laboring  man.  This  is  an  element 

vhich  the  gentleman  seems  to  have  omitted  from  his  calculation 

^together. 
"The  gentleman  says  that  at  the  present  time  laborers  are  doing 

tetter  than  in  1860.  I  ask  him  how  many  strikes  there  were  among 
laborers  in  1860-61  ?  Were  there  any  at  all  ?  And  how  many 
were  there  in  1868  ?  Will  the  gentleman  deny  that  strikes  exhibit 
the  unsettled  and  unsatisfactory  condition  of  labor  in  its  relations  to 
capital  ?  In  our  mines,  in  our  mills  and  furnaces,  in  our  manufac 
turing  establishments,  are  not  the  laborers  every  day  joining  in 
strikes  for  higher  wages,  and  saying  that  they  need  them  on  ac 
count,  of  the  high  price  of  provisions,  or  that  the  capitalists  get  too 
large  a  share  of  the  profits  ?  " 

The  gentleman  has  my  thanks  for  bringing  this  significant 
fact,  so  destructive  of  his  own  argument  and  that  of  Mr. 
Wells,  to  my  attention.  He  knows  that  it  was  not  until 
Jeshuruu  waxed  fat  that  he  kicked ;  and  he  ought  to 


REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE.     201 

know  that  unemployed  workmen,  who  had  drawn  the  last 
dollar  from  the  savings-bank,  and  parted  with  furniture  in 
exchange  for  food  and  fuel,  were  ndt  in  a  condition  to 
strike,  and  had  no  employers  whose  decrees  they  might 
resist.  I  need  no  more  powerful  illustration  of  the 
absurdity  of  the  assertions  of  the  Commissioner  than  the 
fact  that  the  workingmen  of  to-day,  in  contrast  with  their 
abject  condition  in  1860,  find  so  wide  a  market  for  their 
labor  and  are  so  comparatively  easy  in  their  condition  that 
when  their  rights  or  interests  are  assailed  they  are  able  to 
offer  resistance  to  the  assailant. 

Our  positions  are  fairly  taken,  and  as  the  condition  of 
savings-banks  furnishes  the  truest  and  most  general  index  to 
the  condition  of  the  laboring  people,  the  facts  I  am  about 
to  present  will  overthrow  him  who  is  in  error.  Be  the 
judgment  of  the  general  public  what  it  may,  I  am  confi 
dent  that  the  memory  of  every  American  workingman  who 
remembers  the  experience  of  1860  will  sustain  me  in  this 
controversy.  Having  shown  the  loss  of  depositors  and 
deposits  in  the  only  banks  from  which  I  could  obtain  in 
formation  on  those  points  in  or  about  1860,  let  me  show 
the  increase  of  depositors  and  deposits  in  the  same  banks 
in  1867  and  1868 : 

State  or  City.  Year.  mimbe'r  o?  Increase  of 

deposit,  rs. 

New  Hampshire  ....1867  4,967  $2.672,15005 

1868  7,476  2,705,242  01 

Massachusetts 1867  31,740  12.699,319  40 

1868  34,501  14,406,75283 

Rhode  Island 1867  6,845  3.651,93411 

"       1868  4.429  2,984.988  81 

Philadelphia 1867  2,490  579,746  03 

1868  2,234  761,901  00 


94,682  $40,462,034  24 

The  contrast  these  figures  present  to  those  of  1860  does 
not  give  the  Commissioner's  theory  much  support,  and 
casts  a  shade  of  doubt  over  the  accuracy  of  the  position 
taken  by  the  gentleman  from  Ohio.  It  may,  however,  be 
regarded  as  exceptional,  and  I  therefore  propose  to  present 
a  broader  range  of  facts,  embracing  the  amount  of  deposits 
in  the  banks  of  Maine,  New  Hampshire,  Massachusetts, 
Newark,  New  Jersey,  and  the  only  institution  at  Philadel 
phia  from  which  I  have  been  able  to  obtain  this  informa 
tion  for  the  years  1860-61  and  1867-68.  I  have  sought  for 


262       REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE. 

corresponding  facts  from  the  other  New  England  States 
and  New  York,  but  have  not  been  able  to  obtain  them. 
These  tables  are,  therefore,  as  complete  as  industry  and  the 
broadest  research  possible  in  so  limited  a  period  could 
make  them.  As,  however,  they  present  so  perfect  a  cor 
respondence  for  both  periods  it  is  fair  to  presume  that  they 
indicate  the  condition  of  the  savings-banks  and  their  de 
positors  throughout  the  country.  The  total  amount  of 
deposits  in  these  banks  in  1860-61  was  as  follows  : 

I860  1861 

Maine $1.466,457  56  $1,620,270  26 

New  Hampshire 4,860,024  86  5,590,652  18 

Massachusetts 45,054,236  00  44,785.439  00 

llhode  Island 9,163,760  41  9,282,879  74 

Philadelphia 4,083,450  28  2,251,646  46 

,T         ,                                f  1,687.551  51  1,539.932  34 

jNewark \     253,82672  269,18267 


66,569,307  34         $65,330,002  65 
65,330,002  65 

Decrease $1,239,304  69 

By  this  statement  it  is  shown  that  the  savings-banks  in 
these  four  States  and  two  cities  in  one  year,  during  what 
the  Commissioner  and  the  gentleman  from  Ohio  call  a  sea 
son  of  great  prosperity  for  working  people,  lost  deposits 
amounting  to  $1,239,304  69. 

The  total  deposits  for  1867  and  1868  in  the  banks  of 
the  same  States,  the  same  institution  in  Philadelphia,  the 
same  in  Newark,  with  the  addition  already  referred  to  of 
a  dime  savings  institution  which  was  not  in  existence  in 
1861,  were  as  follows: 

1867.  1868. 

Maine $5.998,600  26  $8,132,246  71 

New  Hampshire 10,463,418  50  13,541,534  96 

Massachusetts 80,431,583  74  94,838,336  54 

Ehode  Island 21,413,647  14  24,408,635  95 

Philadelphia 5,003,37942  5,765,28063 

4,405,726  46  5,430,874  60 

Newark <(  1,116,762  26  1,338,596  94 

325,920  57  468,160  74 


$128,759,038  32          153,823,667  07 
128.759.038  32 


Increase $25,064,628  75 

This  exhibit  is  as  unfortunate  for  the   Commissioner's 
facts  and  theories  as  that  which  preceded  it,  for  it  shows 


REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE.     263 

that  in  spite  of  all  his  rhetoric  about  the  crudities  and  op 
pressive  character  of  the  legislation  of  Congress  the  de 
posits  in  these  banks,  which  fell  off  so  largely  in  his  sea 
son  of  prosperity,  have  increased  §25,064,628  75  during 
the  last  ye£r,  and  that  the  aggregate  deposit  at  the  close 
of  1868,  his  disastrous  period,  is  largely  more  than  double 
that  of  1860,  which  he  says  was  so  prosperous.  In 
the  pursuit  of  a  complete  comparative  table  for  these 
four  years  I  have  obtained  an  amount  of  information 
which,  though  it  does  not  relate  to  the  particular  years 
alluded  to,  will  not  be  without  interest  to  the  House  and 
the  country,  and  I  will  therefore  proceed  to  present  the 
figures  with  as  much  method  as  I  can. 

Through  the  kind  assistance  of  the  honorable  gentle 
man  from  the  Troy  district,  New  York,  [Mr.  Griswold,] 
I  have  authentic  statistics  from  the  savings-banks  of  his 
State  ;  and  though  we  were  unable  to  obtain  the  figures 
for  the  years  1861  or  1868,  I  can  present  the  number  of 
depositors,  the  total  amount  of  deposits,  and  the  amount 
deposited  during  each  year  for  the  years  1860,  1866,  and 
1867.  They  were  as  follows: 

Voaf.  Total  number  Total  amount  T°ta1  <*e' 

of  depositor,  of  deposit, 


1860  .........  300.693     $67,440,397     $34,934,271 

1866  ..........  488,501     131,769,074      84,765,054 

1867  ..........  537,466     151,127,562      99,147,321 

From  Vermont  I  have  been  able  to  obtain  only  the 
total  amount  of  deposits  for  1867  and  1868.  They  were 
as  follows  : 

year  Total  amount 

of  deposits. 

1867  .....................................  $1,898,107  58 

1868  .....................................   2,128,641  52 

From  Connecticut  I  have  been  able  to  obtain  but  the 
total  amount  of  deposits  for  I860,  1861  and  1866.  They 
are  as  follows  : 

V_Q_  Total  amount 

of  deposits. 

1860  ....................................  $18,132,820  00 

1861  ....................................  19.377.670  00 

1866  ....................................   31,224,464  25 

Thus  the  figures  derived  from  every  quarter  are  con 
sistent  with  each  other,  and  the  contrast  between  the  con 
dition  of  things  that  prevailed  between  1857  and  1861  — 


264    REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE, 

for  the  return  to  which  the  Commissioner  sighs — and  that 
from  1861  to  the  close  of  1868,  which  he  so  deprecates,  is 
in  itself  sufficient  to  show  the  grotesque  absurdity  of  his 
theory,  that  the  head  of  every  family  could  save  money 
and  make  deposits  in  1860  and  that  none  but  ^unmarried 
people  could  do  so  in  1867  and  1868.  Let  me  repeat  his 
language  on  this  point : 

"  Unmarried  operatives,  therefore,  gain ;  while  those  who  are 
obliged  to  support  their  own  families  in  hired  tenements  lose.  Hence 
deposits  in  savings-banks  increase,  while  marriage  is  discouraged ; 
and  the  forced  employment  of  young  children  is  made  almost  a 
necessity  in  order  that  the  family  may  live." 

The  country  will  hardly  believe  that  when  every  head 
of  a  family  among  the  laboring  people  of  New  York  could 
save  money  the  whole  number  put  at  interest  but  $34,000,- 
000  per  annum,  and  that  when  their  condition  had  been  so 
sadly  impaired  by  the  unwise  legislation  of  Congress  that 
people  feared  to  marry  because  their  wages  would  not  ena 
ble  them  to  support  families  they  deposited  $99,000,000 
annually,  or  nearly  three  dollars  for  one,  and  that  the  num 
ber  of  depositors  nearly  doubled,  and  the  total  amount  on 
deposit  to  their  credit  ran  up  one  hundred  and  twenty-five 
per  cent. 

Thus,  in  defiance  of  the  Commissioner's  facts,  heartily  as 
they  are  indorsed  by  the  gentleman  from  Ohio,  the  returns 
from  savings-banks  prove  that,  with  our  labor  protected 
and  a  cheap  and  expanded  currency,  our  small  farmers  and 
workingmen  have  been  able  to  lay  up  hundreds  of  millions 
of  capital  for  their  support  in  age  or  adversity,  and  upon 
which  they  receive  interest.  These  are  happily  corrobo 
rated  by  other  facts,  which  in  a  striking  manner  prove  the 
superiority  of  the  present  condition  of  the  classes  of  peo 
ple  to  which  I  allude  over  that  to  which  the  Special  Com 
missioner  of  the  Revenue  would  lead  them  back.  While 
accumulating  capital  in  savings-banks  they  have  felt  them 
selves  able  to  make  still  more  ample  provision  for  their 
families  after  they  shall  have  been  called  away  by  the 
dread  summoner,  death.  In  the  course  of  the  former  dis 
cussion  of  this  subject  I  invited  your  attention  to  the  fact 
that  in  Massachusetts  alone  there  were  policies  of  life  in 
surance  outstanding  on  the  1st  of  January,  1868,  for  the 
enormous  sum  of  $1,234,630,473.  Through  the  further 
kindness  of  the  gentleman  from  New  York  [Mr.  Griswoldj 


REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE       265 

1  have  been  able  to  obtain  the  life-insurance  statistics  for 
that  State  for  1859,  1860,  1866,  and  1867.  The  tables 
show  the  number  of  policies  in  force  at  the  close  of  each 
of  these  years,  the  total  amount  of  the  policies,  and  the 
number  of  companies  issuing  them : 

No  of  No  of  Amount 

Year.  compu-  poli-  of  policies  in 

Dies.  ciea.  force. 

1859 14  49.617  $141.497,97782 

1860 17  56.046  163,703,45531 


Increase 3  6,429  $22,205,477  49 

1866 39          305,390  $853,105,87724 

1867 43          401,140  1,161,729,776  27 


Increase 4  95,750  $308,623,89903 

From  this  table  it  will  be  seen  that  the  increase  in  the 
number  of  policies  and  the  amount  insured  during  1867 
was  nearly  a  hundred  per  cent,  in  excess  of  the  total  num 
ber  insured  and  the  amount  of  insurance  at  the  close  of 
1860,  and  that  the  percentage  of  policies  for  such  small 
sums  as  small  farmers  or  workingmen  may  maintain  had 
increased,  as  the  average  value  of  policies  in  1860  was 
$2,920  88,  and  had  fallen  to  $2,896  07  in  1867. 

I  had  hoped  to  present  results  from  the  life  insurance 
companies  of  Connecticut,  but  have  failed  to  receive  them. 
I  have,  however,  some  facts  from  one  company  chartered  by 
New  Jersey  whose  office  is  at  Newark  and  its  principal 
branch  at  Philadelphia.  Through  the  kindness  of  the 
gentleman  from  New  Jersey  [Mr.  Halsey]  I  am  able  to 
present  the  number  of  policies  issued  by  the  Mutual  Bene 
fit  Life  Insurance  Company,  the  Company  referred  to,  on 
the  1st  of  January  of  four  years.  They  are  as  follows  : 

Tint.a  No.  of  policies 

outstanding. 

January,  1861 7.575 

January,  1862 7.026 

January,  1867 29.858 

January,  1868 34,31 

I  have  also  been  favored  with  the  number  of  policies 
outstanding  for  substantially  the  same  period  by  the 
American  Life  Insurance  Company  of  Philadelphia,  to 
gether  with  the  number  of  its  policies  which  were  for 
$3000  or  less.  They  are  as  follows  : 


266       BE  PORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE. 

No.  of  Amount 

olicies.  insured  for. 

December  31,  1860 991  $1,090,450  00 

December  31,1861 1,120  1,206,000  00 

December  31,  1867 7,656  18,312,478  93 

December  31,  1868 10,282  24,759,901  59 

The  number  of  these  policies  in  each  year,  which  were 
on  the  lives  of  people  of  limited  or  moderate  means,  and 
were  for  §3000  or  less  was  as  follows : 

v  No.  of  Amount 

policies.  insured. 

1860 827  $789.15000 

]  861 938  920,600  00 

1867 6,125  9.724,378  93 

1868 6,689  13,021,878  93 

The  relative  magnitude  of  our  national  debt  disappears 
before  these  statistics  ;  for  if  the  policies  existing  be  main 
tained  the  companies  of  Massachusetts  and  New  York  and 
the  two  referred  to  outside  of  those  States  will  pay  to  the 
widows  and  children  or  creditors  of  the  parties  insured  a 
sum  vastly  in  excess  of  our  total  debt,  and  it  is  not  unfair 
to  assume  that  the  greater  portion  of  the  whole  amount 
will  be  paid  to  that  class  of  people  whom  the  Commis 
sioner  describes  as  so  oppressed  by  a  protective  tariff  and 
the  cheap  and  abundant  currency  now  in  use.  When  in 
my  former  remarks  on  this  subject  I  invited  your  atten 
tion  to  the  figures  relating  to  life  insurance  then  in  my 
possession,  I  said : 

"When  people  in  addition  to  laying  up  money  at  interest  are  in 
suring1  their  lives,  they  are  living  well ;  but  when,  as  in  1860,  past 
accumulations  in  savings-banks  are  running  down,  and  they  are 
wasting  their  time  in  enforced  idleness,  they  cannot  live  well  and 
contribute  freely  to  the  support  of  the  Government.  Accept  the 
recommendations  of  the  Commissioner  and  you  will  paralyze  indus 
try,  reduce  wages,  throw  the  producing  classes  upon  their  deposits 
for  support,  and  deprive  them  of  the  power  to  keep  up  the  insur 
ance  on  their  lives.  Such  facts  as  I  have  presented  are  sufficient  to 
refute  a  thousand  fine-spun  theories.  It  may  with  the  ingenuity  that 
fashioned  this  report,  be  said  that  the  policies  to  which  I  have  re 
ferred  are  on  the  lives  of  wealthy  people.  But  such  is  not  the  case  ; 
two  hundred  and  sixty-five  out  of  each  thousand  of  them  are  for 
81000  or  less  ;  five  hundred  and  forty  out  of  each  thousand  are  for 
$2000  or  less  ;  seven  hundred  out  of  each  thousand  for  $3000  or 
less.  Only  three  hundred  out  of  each  thousand  are  for  amounts 
over  $3000.  These  policies  are  the  precautions  taken  by  well-paid 
industry  to  provide  for  widowhood  and  orphanage  after  the  head  of 
the  family  shall  have  paid  mortality's  last  debt." 

It  is  not  improper,  Mr.  Chairman,  that  in  concluding  this 


REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE.      267 

branch  of  my  subject  I  should  say  that  I  have  presented 
no  statement  which  is  not  warranted  by  official  indorse 
ment,  and  that  I  hesitate  not  to  assert  that  could  the  busi 
ness  of  the  savings-banks  and  life  insurance  companies  of 
the  whole  country  be  investigated  the  results  would  con 
form  to  those  I  have  produced.  They  are  truly  surprising, 
and  should  they  through  our  widely  diffused  periodicals 
find  their  way  across  the  waters,  will  prove  an  abundant 
antidote  to  the  Commissioner's  notice  to  those  who  have 
thought  of  emigrating  to  this  country,  but  who  desire  to 
live  in  wedlock,  that  they  may  not  hope  to  do  so  under  the 
legislation  of  that  Congress  which  has  for  several  years 
been  in  such  absolute  government  of  the  country  as  to 
render  the  veto  power  of  the  Executive  nugatory.  They 
are,  in  my  judgment,  important  enough  to  produce  some 
effect  upon  the  credit  of  the  country,  for  they  show  that 
our  laboring  people  are  saving  and  putting  at  interest  hun 
dreds  of  millions  of  dollars  annually,  and  that  the  people 
at  large  are  paying  from  their  abundance  more,  largely 
more,  than  the  interest  on  our  national  debt  to  life  insur 
ance  companies,  as  a  provision  for  their  widows  and  orphans 
when  they  shall  no  longer  be  able  to  provide  for  and  pro 
tect  them.* 


*  The  facts  presented  in  the  text,  exhibit  the  condition  of  the  workingraen 
of  Protective  America,  and  the  following  testimony  of  Wm.  Hoyle,  of  Manches 
ter,  and  R.  Dudley  Baxter,  will  show  how  it  compares  with  that  of  those  of 
Free  Trade  England.  It  is  found  on  pages  38  to  42  of  the  4th  edition  of  Our 
National  Resources,  by  Wm.  Hoyle.  London.  1870. 

"The  present  population  of  the  United  Kingdom  (1869)  is  30,838,210;  of 
these,  1,281,651  are  returned  as  paupers,  and  6692  as  vagrants. 

"  The  following  table  will  show  the  gradual  and  continued  increase  in  our 
pauperism.  It  gives  the  number  of  paupers  in  the  United  Kingdom  from  1860 
to  1870  inclusive: 


England 
and  Wales. 

Scotland. 

Ireland. 

Total. 

1860 

851,020 

114,209 

44,929 

1,010,158 

1861 

890,423 

117,113 

50,683 

1,058,219 

1862 

946,166 

118,928 

59,541 

1,124,635 

1863 

1,142,624 

120,284 

66,228 

1,329,136 

1864 

1,009,289 

120,705 

68,135 

1,198,129 

1865 

971,433 

121,394 

69,217 

1,162,044 

1866 

920,344 

119,608 

65,057 

1,105,009 

1867 

958,824 

121,169 

68,650 

1,148,643 

1868 

1,034,823 

128,976 

72,925 

1,236,724 

1869 

1,039,549 

128,339 

74,745 

1,242,633 

1870 

1,079,391 

73,921 

"  The  Government  returns  as  to  pauperism  and  vagrancy  do  not,  however,  by 
any  means  represent  the  extent  of  these  two  evils.     They  give  the  number 


263      REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE. 

The  Commissioner's  theory,  that  our  legislation  is  mak 
ing  the  rich  richer  and  the  poor  poorer,  is  that  which  was 
hurled  at  us  by  every  copperhead  orator,  from  Horatio 
Seymour  down,  during  the  last  canvass.  We  also  encoun 
tered  it  in  every  rebel  paper  in  the  South,  and  there  were 
those  who  feared  that  it  might  produce  an  effect  upon  the 
popular  mind.  I  was  not  one  of  them.  The  American 
people  are  intelligent  enough  to  know  when  they  have  the 
toothache,  or  are  involved  in  a  lawsuit,  or  are  being 
stripped  of  property  through  the  medium  of  a  sheriffs 
sale,  and  remembering  the  disasters  of  the  last  free-trade  and 
hard-money  era  of  the  country,  I  contrasted  it  with  their 
present  condition  and  relied  confidently  upon  their  judg 
ment.  In  order  to  test  the  accuracy  of  my  memory  and 
judgment  on  this  point,  I  appealed  during  the  canvass  to 
the  statistics  of  my  own  city,  and  among  other  telling  facts 
found,  as  I  have  already  told  you,  that  in  1860  the  sheriff 
of  Philadelphia  had  received  seventeen  hundred  and  forty 
writs  for  the  sale  of  real  estate,  and  that  in  1867  he  had 


of  paupers  on  the  books  on  the  1st  day  of  January,  and  the  number  of  vagrants 
who  apply  for  lodging  or  casual  relief  on  the  same  day ;  but  this,  but  very  im 
perfectly  portrays  the  pauperism,  etc.  of  the  country.  According  to  this  method 
of  reckoning,  if  a  man  becomes  chargeable  to  the  union  on  the  2d  of  January,  and 
comes  off  again  on  the  31st  of  December,  he  is  not  counted,  though  he  has  been 
receiving  relief  during  the  whole  year,  except  two  days.  The  statistics  of  the 
Poor  Law  Board,  give  the  number  of  paupers  and  vagrants  relieved  on  one  day, 
(which  is  what  they  profess  to  do),  but  it  does  not  give  the  number  of  persons 
who  get  relief  as  paupers  and  vagrants  during  the  year.  This  is  the  idea  gener 
ally  received,  but  it  is  erroneous. 

"  In  order  to  get  the  number  of  persons  who  received  relief  during  1869,  we 
must  multiply  1,281,651  by  3£,  which  gives  4,485,778.  This,  then,  is  the  real 
number  of  persons  who  were  chargeable  as  paupers,  at  one  time  or  another,  during 
that  year,  or  nearly  one  in  seven  of  the  entire  population.  Admitting  that  a 
considerable  number  of  these  might  be  persons  who  applied  twice  or  three  times 
over  during  the  year,  it  would  still  leave  us  about  one  in  every  ten  of  the  popu 
lation  as  having  been  paupers  during  the  course  of  the  year." 

"In  reference  to  this  subject,  Mr.  R.  Dudley  Baxter,  in  his  work  on  Nation 
al  Income,  remarks : — 

"  '  The  average  number  of  paupers  at  one  time  in  receipt  of  relief  in  1866,  was 
916,000,  being  less  than  for  any  of  the  four  preceding  years.  The  total  number 
relieved  during  1866  may,  on  the  authority  of  a  return  of  1867,  given  in  the 
Appendix,  be  calculated  at  three  and  a  half  times  that  number,  or  3,000,000. 
All  these  may  be  considered  as  belonging  to  the  16,000,000  of  the  manual  labor 
classes,  being  as  nearly  as  possible,  twenty  per  cent,  on  their  number;  but  the 
actual  cases  of  relief  give  a  very  imperfect  idea  of  the  loss  of  work  and  wages. 
A  large  proportion  of  the  poor  submit  to  great  hardships,  and  are  many  weeks, 
and  even  months,  out  of  work  before  they  will  apply  to  the  guardians.  They 
exhaust  their  savings;  they  try  to  the  utmost,  their  trade  unions  or  benefit 
societies;  they  pawn  little  by  little  all  their  furniture;  and  at  last  are  driven  to 
ask  relief.' 

"  But  even  the  figures  which  have  been  given  do  not  by  any  means  represent 
adequately  the  pressure  of  our  poverty.  There  are  a  very  large  number  of  per 
sons  who  are  dependent  upon  their  friends  and  relations ;  and  there  are  a  nuia- 


REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVEXUE.       269 

received  but  seven  hundred  and  six — a  decrease  of  more 
than  sixty  per  cent.,  although  the  population  of  the  city 
had  increased  more  than  forty  per  cent.  What  makes  this 
fact  more  significant  is,  that  under  our  system  of  selling 
land  under  ground  rents  the  purchase  of  a  homestead  is  the 
savings-bank  of  the  Philadelphia  workingman.  I  also  as 
certained  the  number  of  suits  that  were  instituted  in  the 
years  1857-58-59  and  1865-66  and  1867,  respectively,  in 
our  local  courts.  The  evidence  from  this  source  is  not 
less  significant  than  any  that  has  preceded  it.  The  court 
of  common  pleas  is  emphatically  the  poor  man's  court.  It 
obtains  jurisdiction  by  appeal  from  the  judgments  of  mag 
istrates,  and  the  amount  at  issue  before  its  juries  is  for 
sums  less  than  $100.  The  result  of  my  investigation 
showed  that  the  number  of  suits  brought  in  the  latter 
years,  notwithstanding  the  increase  of  population  which 
had  taken  place,  was  but  little  more  than  one-half  the  num 


ber  who,  as  Dudley  Baxter  says,  submit  to  great  hardships  sooner  than  apply 
for  relief.  If  all  who  are  thus  situated  be  summed  up,  it  cannot  amount  to 
much  less  than  one-third  of  the  entire  population  of  the  manual  labor  class,  or 
from  fifteen  to  twenty  per  cent,  of  the  entire  population. 

"  The  Government  returns  in  reference  to  vagrancy  are  even  more  imperfect  and 
unsatisfactory  than  the  pauper  returns.  I  have  not  been  able  to  obtain  any 
national  figures  to  illustrate  this,  but  it  will  be  sufficiently  manifest  if  I  give  the 
statistics  in  reference  to  one  union — the  Bury  Union,  in  which  I  reside. 

'•  The  following  table  gives  the  number  of  paupers  and  vagrants  returned  to  the 
Poor-Law  Board,  January  1st,  1870,  and  published  in  their  report  as  represent 
ing  the  pauperism  and  vagrancy  in  the  Bury  Union,  the  population  of  which, 
in  1861,  was  101,142. 

Paupers 4,372 

Vagrants 11 

"  The  actual  number  of  cases  of  pauperism  and  vagrancy  during  the  year  end 
ing  March,  1870,  in  the  Bury  Union  was  as  follows: 

No.  of  cases  of  Paupers  relieved 15,012 

"  "         Vagrants     "         15,474 

"  These  returns  corroborate  the  figures  given  by  Mr.  Purdy,  in  reference  to 
the  pauperism  of  the  country;  and  they  show  that  if  the  total  cases  of  vagrancy 
during  the  year  were  given,  it  would  numerically  be  equal  to,  or  greater  than 
the  number  of  paupers. 

"  No  doubt  a  very  large  number  of  the  vagrant  cases  are  from  among  the  pau 
pers,  and  in  a  large  proportion  of  the  cases,  the  same  parties  apply  several  times 
over  in  the  same  Union,  and  also  at  different  Unions;  still,  it  shows  that  there  is  a 
very  large  class  of  our  population  who  have  no  fixed  dwelling-place;  they  move 
about  getting  a  living,  by  begging  or  stealing,  or  by  imposition  upon  the  public, 
*s  may  be  most  convenient.  Adding  this  class  to  the  pauper  class,  it  reveals  an 
amount  of  destitution  and  demoralization  in  the  country  that  is  perfectly  appal 
ling,  and  that  ia  a  lasting  disgrace  to  our  civilization  and  Christianity." 


270      REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE. 

ber  instituted  in  the  former  period.     The  figures  are  as 
follows : 

SUITS    IN    COMMON    PLEAS. 

1857 2.503 

1858 2.651 

1859 3,041 


8,195 

1865 , 1,500 

1866 1,4-61 

1867 1,672 

4,633 


Decrease  of  cases 3,562 

The  jurisdiction  of  the  district  court  extends  to  all  cases 
involving  more  than  $100.  Its  records  are  consistent  with 
those  of  the  common  pleas.  The  figures  from  its  records 
are  as  follows : 

DISTRICT    COURT. 

1857 9,894 

1858 9,702 

1859 7,262 

26,858 

1865 4.977 

1866 5,716 

1867 6,674 

17,367 

Decrease 9,491 

I  am  sure  I  do  Mr.  Wells  no  injustice  when  I  complain 
of  his  palpable  negligence  in  omitting  to  appeal  to  such 
sources  of  information  as  I  have  indicated,  and  attempting 
to  deduce  general  laws  by  which  to  guide  our  legislation 
from  the  lame  and  impotent  array  of  facts  he  has  digested. 
We  pay  him  a  salary  which  he  deems  adequate.  His 
traveling  expenses  are  at  the  cost  of  the  Treasury,  and  he 
is  surrounded  by  a  competent  clerical  force,  and  that  he 
should  have  rested  all  his  theories  upon  an  array  of  facts 
so  meagre  and  so  easily  disproved  is,  to  say  the  least,  not 
creditable  to  his  industry  or  judgment. 

The  gentleman  from  Ohio  [Mr.  Garfield]  told  us  that 
hearing  of  my  intended  attack  he  had  asked  information 
from  two  sources  in  order  to  test  the  correctness  of  the 
Commissioner's  position.  That  was  an  idle  waste  of  time. 
Had  he  spent  it  in  examining  Mr.  Wells'  figures,  he  would 
have  discovered  from  their  own  manifest  incongruity  that 
no  two  or  two  hundred  authorities  could  give  them  a  char 
acter  for  respectability  or  the  weight  of  authority.  The 


KEPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE.       271 


gentleman  is  an  arithmetician  and  knows  that  $111,000  are 
not  twenty-one  and  forty-nine  hundredths  per  cent,  of 
$5,164,500,  and  that  $37,000  are  not  seven  and  twenty-six 
hundredths  per  cent,  of  $5,053,500.  Yet  the  Commis 
sioner  tells  us  they  are,  and  so  impairs  the  value  of  the 
important  table  on  page  111  of  his  report.  I  invite  the 
gentleman's  attention  to  the  two  elaborate  tables  to  be 
found  on  page  16  of  the  report,  the  first  purporting  to 
show  in  parallel  columns  the  "  average  weekly  expendi 
tures  for  provisions,  house-rent,"  etc. ;  the  second,  "  average 
weekly  earnings,"  and  the  third  "surplus  for  clothing, 
housekeeping  goods,"  etc.,  of  families  in  1867  ;  the  other 
in  corresponding  columns  purporting  to  show  "  average 
weekly  expenditures  of  families  of  varying  numbers  in 
the  manufacturing  towns  of  the  United  States  for  the  years 
1860  and  1867,  respectively." 

More  remarkable  tables  than  these  never  were  prepared 
by  statistician.  I  had  supposed  that  Mr.  Delmar,  late 
chief  of  the  Bureau  of  Statistics,  was  a  paragon  in  his  way; 
but  he  must  look  out  for  his  honors,  for  in  these  tables 
the  Special  Commissioner  of  Eevenue  has  beaten  him 
roundly  in  his  own  department.  Unhappy  Delmar! 
Happy  Commissioner  Wells !  For  Delmar's  report  Con 
gress  had  nothing  but  an  indignant  vote  requiring  its  sup 
pression,  though  it  lay  ready  printed  and  bound ;  but  for 
Wells'  budget  of  more  egregious  blunders  it  has  such 
admiration  and  approval,  that  no  love  of  economy  could 
restrain  it  from  voting  to  print  it  for  the  widest  possible 
circulation.  The  tables  to  which  I  refer  must  speak  for 
themselves,  for  no  man  can  describe  or  characterize  them 
They  are  as  follows : 

Average  aggregate  weekly  earnings  and  expenses  of  families  for  1867. 


Size  of  families. 

Average    weekly 
expenditures 
for    provisions, 
house-rent,  etc. 

Average  weekly 
earnings. 

Surplus  for  cloth 
ing,  housekeep 
ing  goods,  etc. 

Parents  and  one  child 

$10  24 

41  7   nf) 

^fi  7fi 

Three  adults  

8  35 

17  52 

91  7 

Parents  and  two  children. 

]9    96 

18  75 

6AQ 

Parents  and  three  children  
Parents  and  four  children  

15  02 
17  79 

19  50 
23  33 

4  48 

6ZA 

Parents  and  five  children.        .... 

15  93 

1711 

Parents  and  six  children 

11  67 

13  50 

Parents  and  seven  children  

23  78 

25  00 

1  22 

General  average  of  the  above... 

$14  29 

$18  96 

$4  67 

272       REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE. 


Table  showing  Ihf,  average  weekly  expenditures  of  families  of  varying  numbers  in  the  manu 
facturing  towns  of  the  United  States  for  the  years  1860  and  1867,  respectively. 


Size  of  families. 

Average  weekly 

wages. 

Average    weekly 
expenditures    for 
provisions,  house- 
rent,  clothing,  etc. 

Surplus 
in  1860. 

In  1867. 

In  1860. 

In  1867. 

In  1860. 

$17  00 
17  52 
18  75 
19  50 
23  33 
17  11 
13  50 
25  00 

$12  17 
12  00 
11  50 
12  41 
14  15 
10  37 
9  50 
15  17 

$17  00 
17  52 
18  75 
19  50 
23  33 
17  11 
13  50 
25  00 

$9  96 
10  31 
10  79 
11  33 

13  18 
9  46 
7  67 
14  09 

$2  21 
1  69 
71 
1  08 
97 
91 
1  83 
1   08 

Parents  and  two  children  

Parents  and  four  children  

Parents  and  six  children  

General  average  of  the  above.... 

$18  95 

$12  16 

$18  96 

$10  85 

$1  31 

I  hope  the  gentleman  from  Ohio  will  give  these  tables  a 
reasonable  amount  of  consideration,  and  if  he  still  thinks 
they  may  be  correct  refer  them  to  another  authority — the 
ancient  matrons  of  his  district.  But  before  making  this 
reference,  I  beg  him  to  advise  the  ladies  of  the  fact  that 
he  draws  his  question  from  an  official  document ;  for  if  he 
fails  to  take  this  precaution  they  will  hold  him  guilty  of 
perpetrating  a  practical  joke  at  their  expense,  by  submit 
ting  to  their  judgment  so  absurd  a  proposition.  They 
will  doubtless  admit  that  parents  with  two  children  cannot 
live  so  well  on  the  same  money  as  parents  with  but  one, 
and  that  as  a  general  rule  it  costs  more  to  maintain  parents 
and  three  children  than  is  required  for  the  support  of 
those  with  but  two  or  one,  and  that  the  same  is  true  with 
/eference  to  parents  and  four  children  ;  but  they  will  pro 
bably  doubt  his  sincerity  when  he  asks  whether  parents 
with  five  children  can  live  as  well  on  less  money  than  is 
required  to  support  parents  with  but  three,  and  will  laugh 
at  the  proposition  that  parents  with  six  children  can  live 
as  well  on  less  money  than  parents  with  but  two ;  and  I 
think  I  hear  them  crying  out,  "  Why,  sir,  what  do  you 
mean  by  asking  us  whether  parents  with  six  children  can 
live  i'or  less  than  parents  with  two,  and  yet  in  the  same 
breath  telling  us  that  if  they  happen  to  have  a  seventh,  be 
it,  boy  or  girl,  it  will  more  than  double  the  expenses  of  the 
whole  family?"  Unwelcome  seventh  child  !  According 
to  Wells  you  come  into  the  family  of  every  laboring  man 


doubta  the   household  expenses 


though 


all   your  six 


REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE.       273 

predecessors  be  still  sheltered  by  the  paternal  roof! 
Lucky  children  numbers  five  and  six! — henceforth  you 
will  be  welcomed  everywhere;  for  the  Special  Commis 
sioner  of  Kevenue  has  proved  that  in  all  instances  your 
coming  reduces  the  expenses  of  the  family  to  less  than 
they  were  when  the  household  flock  consisted  of  but  two ! 
According  to  the  Commissioner  this  law  of  social  life, 
hitherto  undiscovered,  is  absolute,  and  prevailed  alike  in 
1860  and  1867. 

To  invite  attention  to  these  tables  is  to  subject  them  to 
ridicule ;  and  yet,  Mr.  Chairman,  they  are  the  foundation- 
stone  and  the  keystone  of  Mr.  Wells'  entire  structure ; 
upon  them  he  rests  all  his  argument,  and  from  them  he 
deduces  his  conclusion,  that  marriage  is  a  luxury  the 
laboring  people  of  America  cannot  safely  enjoy.  Happily 
for  the  country  they  are  so  flagrantly  and  absurdly  false, 
that  Mr.  Wells'  deductions  and  conclusions  will  be  re 
ceived  but  as  the  vain  imaginings  of  a  dreamy  and  indo 
lent  theorist.* 

In  view  of  the  unquestioned  facts  I  have  brought  to  the 
attention  of  the  committee,  and  the  urgency  of  the  Com 
missioner  for  a  return  to  the  revenue  tariff'  and  contracted 
currency  of  1860, 1  am  forced  to  the  conclusion  that  he  re 
gards  poverty  and  idleness  as  supreme  blessings  to  the 
laboring  people  of  our  country,  and  I  rejoice  that  I  succeeded 
in  obtaining  the  floor  upon  the  motion  to  print  his  report, 
and  sounded  an  alarm  to  the  masses  of  my  countrymen 
by  telling  them  that  it  is  an  insidious  plea  for  their  im 
poverishment. 

In  my  judgment,  the  first  duty  of  an  American  statesman 
is  to  watch  and  guard  the  rights  of  the  laboring  classes  of 
the  country.  They  produce  its  wealth,  they  fight  its  bat 
tles,  and  in  their  hands  is  its  destiny ;  for  at  every  election 
they  cast  a  majority  of  the  ballots,  and  upon  their  intelli 
gence,  integrity,  and  manly  independence  rest  the  welfare 
of  the  country.  To  make  Kepublican  government  an 
enduring  success,  we  must  guard  the  productions  of  ou 
laborers  against  competition  with  those  of  the  ill-paid  and 
oppressed  laborers  of  Europe,  so  that  each  head  of  a  family 
rnay  by  the  wages  he  can  earn  maintain  a  home,  and  be 
able  to  support  his  children  during  the  years  required  to 

*  The  general  judgment  of  Mr.  Wells  is  less  favorable  than  this.  His  sudden 
conversion  to  free  trade  is  generally  ascribed  to  something  more  tangible  than 
dreams. 

18 


274       KEPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE. 

give  them  the  advantages  of  our  common  school  system. 
If  the  Commissioner's  report  proves  anything  to  those 
who  are  able  to  detect  its  fallacies,  and  test  the  fulness  and 
accuracy  of  its  comparative  tables,  it  is  that  under  the  in 
fluence  of  the  cheap  and  abundant  currency  we  now  have, 
and  the  system  of  protection  which  the  war  forced  us  to 
adopt,  the  American  people  are  consuming  more  of  the 
necessaries  and  comforts  of  life  than  they  were  ever  before 
able  to  consume;  are  producing  more  of  what  they  con 
sume  than  ever  before,  and  in  spite  of  the  taxes  imposed 
by  the  national  debt  and  other  incidents  of  the  war,  are 
coming  to  be  commercially  independent  of  other  nations. 
Yes,  sir,  under  the  influence  of  a  tariff  which,  though  it 
levies  duties  on  raw  materials  and  commodities  which  we 
do  not  and  cannot  produce,  is  still  in  a  measure  protective, 
and  an  adequate  amount  of  currency,  we  are  slowly 
emerging  from  our  commercial  dependence  upon  England, 
as  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  our  imports  have  steadily 
diminished  since  1865.  Thus  in  1866,  1867,  and  1868, 
respectively,  the  amounts  of  foreign  merchandise  imported 
into  the  country  were  as  follows : 

Year  ending  30th  of  June,  1866 $423,470,646 

Year  ending  30th  of  June,  1867 374,943,502 

Year  ending  30th  of  June,  1868 344,873,433 

Thus  it  appears  that  notwithstanding  the  facts  that  the 
increase  of  our  wealth  is  unparalleled,  and  the  natural  in 
crease  of  our  population  is  very  rapid,  and  that  "from  the 
1st  of  July,  1865,  to  the  1st  of  December,  1868,  about  one 
million  natives  of  foreign  countries  have  sought  a  perma 
nent  home  in  the  United  States,"  our  purchases  of  foreign 
commodities  are  steadily  diminishing.  The  sapient  de 
duction  of  the  Special  Commissioner  of  the  Kevenue  from 
these  facts  is,  that  we  are  unable  to  trade  with  foreign 
rations,  and  that  to  stimulate  foreign  trade  we  must  reduce 
he  wages  of  our  laborers,  and  diminish  the  amount  of 
currency  now  profitably  employed  in  the  development  of 
our  productive  power.  His  theory  is  that  "  all  commerce 
is  in  the  nature  of  barter  or  exchange,"  and  his  complaint 
is  that: 

"  We  have  so  raised  the  cost  of  all  domestic  products  that  ex 
change  in  kind  with  all  foreign  nations  is  almost  impossible.  The 
majority  of  what  foreign  nations  have  to  sell  us,  as  already  shown, 
we  must  or  will  have.  What  foreign  nations  want  and  we  pro- 


REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVKXUE.       275 

duce,  cotton  and  a  few  other  articles  excepted,  they  can  buy  elsewhere 
cheaper.  We  are,  therefore,  obliged  to  pay  in  no  small  part  for  such 
foreign  productions  as  we  need  or  will  have,  either  in  the  precious 
metals  or,  what  is  worse,  in.  unduly  depreciated  promises  of  national 
payment." 

The  Commissioner's  exception  of  "  cotton  and  a  few 
other  articles"  leaves  Hamlet  out  of  the  play,  and  surren 
ders  his  whole  case,  for  we  can  raise  enough  of  the  articles 
lie  excepts,  and  of  which  we  have  a  natural  monopoly,  to 
pay  for  every  foreign  production  "  we  must  or  will  have." 

The  beneficent  results  of  free  labor  in  the  former  slave 
States  are  an  agreeable  surprise  to  its  most  sanguine  friends. 
The  South  is  abundantly  rich  in  mineral  and  agricultural 
resources,  but  she  is  suffering  from  the  want  of  currency 
to  develop  them.  Were  she  adequately  supplied  with  cur 
rency,  and  the  season  should  be  a  favorable  one,  her  pro 
duction  of  cotton,  and  the  few  other  articles  excepted  by 
the  Commissioner,  would  more  than  double  that  of  1868, 
and  as  other  nations  must  have  her  cotton,  tobacco,  rice, 
and  other  semi-tropical  productions  which  they  cannot 
procure  elsewhere,  it  seems  to  me  that  the  true  way  to  stop 
the  flow  of  precious  metals  and  Government  bonds  is  to 
stimulate  production  by  protecting  the  wages  of  labor  and 
avoiding  any  contraction  of  the  currency.  In  support  of 
this  view,  let  me  call  attention  to  the  fact  that  we  send  from 
eighty  to  one  hundred  million  dollars  abroad  annually  for 
sugar.  If  capitalists  will  lend  the  planters  of  Florida, 
Louisiana,  and  Texas  the  means  to  cultivate  their  sugar- 
fields,  they  will  produce  crops  that  will  save  a  large  per 
centage  of  this  vast  sum  to  the  country.* 

I  showed,  in  a  former  discussion  of  this  subject,  that  we 
bought  about  forty-five  per  cent,  of  the  entire  amount  of 
railroad  iron  exported  by  Great  Britain  during  the  first 
ten  months  of  1868,  saying : 

"  I  hold  in  my  hand  a  circular  which  reads  thus:  'Fifty-eight, 
Old  Broad  street,  London,  November  30, 1868,  from  S.  W.  Hopkins  & 

*  Since  my  remarks  were  delivered,  I  have  received  from  Messrs.  McFarlan 
Straight  &  Co.,  commission  merchants  of  New  Orleans,  their  trade  circular  of 
February  1st,  from  which  I  extract  the  following  corroboration  of  my  views: 

"Receipts  of  the  Louisiana  sugar  crop  this  season  to  30th  ultimo,  inclusive, 
foot  up  47,419  hogsheads  sugar,  and  109,518  barrels,  4692  half  barrels,  and  17 
quarter  barrels  molasses.  But  for  lack  of  promptness  in  commencing  grinding 
early,  and  of  adequate  preparation  on  the  part  of  the  producers  for  securing  a 
large  yield,  and  the  early  severe  frosts,  succeeded  by  floods  of  rain,  the  Louisi 
ana  sugar  crop  of  1868  would  probably  have  reached  115,000  hogsheads  at  least, 
or  about  three  times  the  product  of  1867.  The  yield  of  1868  must  have  been  re- 


270      KEPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE. 

Co..  exporters  of  railway  .iron.  Monthly  Report  of  Exports  of  Kails 
from  Great  Britain,  extracted  from  the  Government  returns.'  By 
this  report  it  appears  that  in  the  ten  months  ending  October  31, 
1868.  Great  Britain  exported  509,968  tons  of  rails.  Gentlemen  pro 
bably  think  that  England's  colonial  dependencies  took  most  of  this 
iron  ;  that  British  India,  British  North  America,  and  Australia  took 
it.  No,  gentlemen  ;  we  are  her  chief  commercial  dependency.  She 
is  our  mistress,  and  we  maintain  her  throne  and  aristocracy.  No ; 
the  British  dependencies  took  but  84,000  tons,  and  her  Republican 
dependency,  the  United  States,  took  228,000  tons.  Of  the  509.968 
tons  of  rails,  we  took  21,000  tons  more  than  were  taken  by  British 
India,  Russia,  British  North  America,  Sweden,  Prussia,  France, 
Spain  and  the  Canaries,  Cuba,  Brazil,  Chili,  and  Australia." 

The  Commissioner  makes  no  note  of  such  facts  as  this, 
but  finding  some  fortunately  situated  manufacturers  of  pig- 
iron  guilty  of  making  profits  almost  equal  to  those  which 
merchants  and  bankers  average,  he  holds  them  up  to  con 
tempt  and  ridicule,  and  wonders — yes,  in  an  official  report, 
sneeringly  expresses  his  surprise — that  they  have  not  pe 
titioned  Congress  to  legislate  for  the  reduction  of  their 
profits!  He  probably  does  not  know  that  the  high  rate  at 
which  pig-iron  is  now  selling  is  stimulating  the  production 
of  that  primary  article  to  an  extent  that  promises  an  early 
home  supply  and  such  competition  among  our  own  people 
as  must  inevitably  cheapen  the  price  of  iron  and  reduce 
the  profits  of  those  whose  product  is  now  in  unusual  re 
quest.  In  proof  of  this  assertion,  I  not  only  point  the 
Commissioner  to  the  rapid  increase  of  the  means  of  pro 
ducing  pig-iron  in  Pennsylvania,  but  appeal  to  all  the  gen 
tlemen  on  this  floor  from  districts  in  or  near  which  coal, 
iron  ore,  and  limestone  are  found.  Districts  hitherto  un 
known  to  the  iron  trade  are  now  producing  large  quanti 
ties  of  pig-iron  ;  and  I  ask  gentlemen  from  New  York,  New 
Jersey,  Ohio,  Indiana,  southern  Illinois,  Missouri,  Alabama, 
Georgia,  Maryland,  West  Virginia,  Kentucky,  Tennessee, 

duced  by  mere  waste,  caused  by  lack  of  wood,  lateness  in  beginning  to  grind 
and  the  unfavorable  weather  during  the  latter  part  of  the  grinding  season,  say 
25,000  hogsheads  or  more,  leaving,  perhsips,  90,000  hogsheads  to  be  realized. 
This  great  waste  from  a  bountiful  crop  is  greatly  to  be  regretted,  and  we  may 
hope  it  will  not  be  repeated. 

"  The  production  of  domestic  cane-sweets,  properly  protected  and  encouraged, 
might  be  increased  fitr  beyond  the  ideas  of  many  who  are  directly  interested.  We 
believe  the  sugar  lands  of  this  State  and  Texas  might  be  made  to  produce  the 
entire  650,000  tons  of  sugar  said  to  be  required  annually  by  the  people  of  the 
United  States,  saving  the  $11)0,000,000  of  specie  paid  yearly  for  foreign 
sweets,  including  charges  and  import  duty,  or  perhaps  fifty  to  sixty  millions  ac 
tually  paid  to  foreign  producers.  We  have  space  only  to  ask  the  genuine  finan 
cier  to  consider  this  important  instrumentality  in  aid  of  a  return  to  the  specie 
baais." — Note  to  Pamphlet  Edition. 


REPORT  OF  SPECIAL  COMMISSIONER  OF  REVENUE.     277 

North  Carolina,  and  Oregon,  whether  there  are  not  more 
furnaces  erecting  in  their  States,  respectively,  than  ever 
were  in  process  of  erection  at  one  time  before,  and  whether 
those  already  existing  are  not  in  full  operation  ?  Virginia 
has  no  voice  on  this  floor  with  which  to  respond  to  my 
appeal,  but  it  is  within  my  knowledge  that  Pennsylvanians 
are  constructing  furnaces,  forges,  and  rolling-mills  in  va 
rious  parts  of  that  State.  If  we  would  turn  the  balance  of 
trade  in  our  favor,  and  put  our  bonds  at  par,  and  stop  the 
outflowing  of  gold  interest  by  receiving  them  in  the  hands 
of  immigrants,  or  in  pay  for  our  cotton,  rice,  tobacco,  pro 
visions,  etc.,  we  must  avoid  the  Commissioner's  nostrums, 
free  trade,  and  hard  money,  and  promote  the  development 
of  the  boundless  natural  resources  of  the  country.  By  no 
other  means  can  we  arrest  the  export  of  specie  and  bonds 
in  exchange  for  foreign  commodities. 

There  are  many  points  in  the  Commissioner's  report  that 
I  would  gladly  review,  but  having  addressed  myself  to  a 
single  one,  I  will  leave  them  for  the  consideration  of  others. 
Meanwhile  I  congratulate  the  country  that  it  is  so  strong, 
and  the  currents  of  its  prosperity  are  so  broad,  and  moving 
with  such  increasing  volume,  that  no  official  report  or  the 
vagaries  of  no  theorist  can  impair  or  arrest  its  progress. 


THE    EIGHT-HOUR    SYSTEM. 

LETTER  TO  THE  OPERATIVES  IN"  THE  WORKSHOPS  AND 
FACTORIES  OF  THE  FOURTH  CONGRESSIONAL  DISTRICT 
OF  PENNSYLVANIA. 

THE  duties  with  which  Congress,  by  special  resolu 
tion,  charged  the  Committee  of  Ways  and  Means,  of 
which  I  am  a  member,  will  probably  consume  the  vacation, 
and  require  me  to  be  absent  from  my  district  and  labor- 
ously  engaged,  while  my  colleagues  are  enjoying  the  rest 
and  recreation  which  with  my  impaired  health  I  so  much 
need. 

I  cannot,  under  the  circumstances,  give  the  time  to 
conference  and  correspondence  with  my  constituents  to 
which  their  interest  in  public  affairs  entitles  them,  and 
therefore  address  you  thus  publicly  on  topics  which  many 
communications  from  you  show  me  you  deem  to  be  of  prim 
ary  importance  at  this  time,  viz:  the  practicability  of  the 
eight-hour  system,  and  the  propriety  of  the  order  of  the 
Secretary  of  the  Navy,  which  apportions  the  pay  of  work 
men  in  the  Navy  Yards  to  the  number  of  hours'  service 
performed. 

Though  your  letters  differ  in  form,  the  substance  is 
about  the  same:  and  by  replying  to  two  questions,  I 
think  I  can  answer  most  of  your  communications.  You 
really  ask  but  two  questions,  and  I  hope  that  each  of  you 
who  has  written  to  me  on  this  subject  will  accept  this  as  a 
reply.  Your  questions  are : 

First : — Are  you  in  favor  of  the  eight-hour  system  ? 
Second  : — Do  you  sustain  the  order  of  the  Secretary  of  the 
Navy  prohibiting  the  payment  of  the  same  wages  for  eight 
hours'  work  in  a  Navy  Yard  that  are  paid  for  ten  hours' 
work  in  private  establishments? 

The  first  question  I  answer  in  the  affirmative.  I  am  in 
favor  of  the  eight-hour  system,  and  am  not  a  recent  con 
vert  to  the  doctrine.  It  is  more  than  35  years  since,  as  an 
apprentice  in  a  jewelry  establishment,  I  united  with  the 
278 


THE   EIGHT-HOUR  SYSTEM.  279 

journeymen  of  that  and  other  trades  in  promoting  the 
recognition  of  the  ten-hour  system.  There  are  some  of 
my  co-laborers  who,  at  this  distant  day,  can  testify  that  in 
support  of  the  reform  we  proposed,  I  then  asserted  that 
the  laborer's  day  should  be  divided  into  three  equal  divi 
sions,  inasmuch  as  he  could  by  eight  hours  of  honest  labor 
produce  enough  to  entitle  him  to  eight  hours  for  rest,  and 
eight  hours  for  recreation  or  study.  At  that  time  a 
mechanic's  day's  work,  at  indoors  employment,  from  Sep 
tember  to  April,  ended  at  eight  o'clock  in  the  evening; 
and  I  never  lighted  my  lamp  for  night-work  without 
feeling  that  humanity  was  outraged  by  the  fact  that  the 
millions  whose  toil  produced  all  the  wealth  were  com 
pelled  at  the  cost  of  sight  and  health  to  labor  thus,  while 
those  who  only  bought  and  sold  their  productions  were 
free  from  such  exactions.  Those  early  convictions  abide 
with  me,  and  have  controlled  my  votes  as  your  represen 
tative. 

It  is  true  that  I  have  not  proposed  to  establish  the  eight- 
hour  system  by  Act  of  Congress.  That  would  have  been 
to  attempt  an  impossibility ;  but  that  I  have  sedulously 
and  courageously  labored  to  remove  all  hindrances,  and 
prepare  the  way  for  its  establishment  is  also  true.  Much 
has  been  done;  and  that  the  time  is  near  when  the  working 
people  of  the  United  States,  if  they  will  take  a  comprehen 
sive  view  of  their  position,  and  firmly  maintain  their  in 
terests,  can  establish  the  eight-hour  system,  I  conscien 
tiously  believe.  One  of  the  principal  obstacles  to  this  just 
reform  has  been  to  some  extent  removed,  and  another, 
which  seemed  to  be  beyond  human  control,  has  been  wholly 
obliterated  during  the  nine  years  through  which  I  have 
been  your  representative.  I,  of  course,  allude  to  free  trade 
and  slavery. 

Our  country  is  so  extended,  its  resources  are  so  vast  and 
diversified,  and  the  sources  of  profitable  employment  for 
our  people  are  so  manifold,  that  we  may  establish  our  own 
industrial  system,  and  maintain  it  against  all  opposition, 
without  abridging  the  quantity  or  quality  of  the  food,  cloth 
ing,  or  culture  of  any  of  our  people. 

We  can  live  and  prosper,  and  expand  while  maintaining 
a  system  of  absolute  commercial  independence.  Then  the 
eight-hour  system  will  be  practicable,  but  until  this  be  ef 
fected,  and  while  our  markets  are  freely  opened  to  the  pro 
ductions  of  Belgium,  France,  Germany,  and  England,  our 


280  THE   EIGHT-HOUR   SYSTEM. 

labor  system  must  conform  more  or  less  closely  to  those  of 
these  competing  nations.  They  produce  every  result  of  me 
chanical  skill  and  labor  that  we  can,  but  they  do  not  pay  the 
same  price  for  any  kind  of  labor.  Belgium  and  France 
pay  for  a  day's  work  by  a  skilled  hand  with  francs  worth 
wenty  cents  gold;  England  with  shillings  worth  twenty  - 
jive  cents  gold ;  and  America  with  dollars  worth  about 
seventy  cents  gold  at  this  time;*  and  the  American 
receives  for  almost  every  variety  of  work  as  many  dollars 
as  the  Englishman  does  shillings,  or  the  Belgian  or  French 
man  francs.  It  is,  therefore,  obvious  that  we  cannot  sell 
our  productions  in  those  countries,  and  that,  in  the  absence 
of  a  tariff  that  will  protect  your  wages,  and  which  will 
equal  the  difference  between  the  wages  which  workmen  in 
those  countries  are  compelled  to  accept,  and  those  which 
you  receive  for  ten  hours',  and  hope  to  get  for  eight  hours' 
labor,  they  can  undersell  us  in  our  own  markets,  and  de 
prive  you  of  work  and  wages  by  closing  o.ur  workshops 
and  factories.  Though  politically  independent,  we  are 
commercially  dependent.  We  endured  a  long  war  as  the 
price  of  our  political  independence,  but  have  hitherto  con 
sented  to  be  held  in  commercial  dependence,  and  to  allow 
Belgium,  France,  Germany,  and  England  to  determine 
what  wages  the  American  workman  shall  receive  and  how 
many  hours  he  shall  work  each  day  to  support  his  family. 
To  promote  our  commercial  independence  and  secure  our 
labor  market  to  our  own  people  and  those  who  may  become 
such  by  immigration,  have  been  the  constant  objects  of  my , 
labors  as  your  representative. 

When  these  objects  shall  be  attained,  the  eight-hour 
system  can  and  will  be  established.  But  till  then,  you  can 
not  enjoy  it.  To  my  mind  nothing  is  more  apparent  than 
this. 

A  word,  now,  as  to  the  prospect.  In  1857,  we  had  a 
revenue  tariff.  Free  trade  prevailed.  What  was  your 
condition  ?  A  large  portion  of  you  were  without  employ 
ment.  The  price  of  goods  was  low,  but  you  had  no  work 
by  which  you  could  earn  money  to  buy  them,  cheap  as 
they  were.  Banks  and  savings  banks  failed :  the  con 
stable  and  sheriff  were  busy  ;  immigration  was  arrested,  and 
large  numbers  of  immigrants,  discouraged  by  the  hopeless 
prospect,  returned  to  their  native  countries  convinced  that 

*  Worth  eighty-seven  cents,  July  10th,  1871. 


THE   EIGHT-HOUR   SYSTEM.  281 

the  American  Republic  was  not  a  happy  home  for  the 
working  man.  Free  trade  is  the  subordination  of  the  im 
mense  productive  interests  of  our  country  to  the  demands 
of  the  few  who  are  engaged  in  foreign  commerce,  and  such 
were  its  natural  results.  We  now  have  a  protective  tariff; 
and  the  circumstances  are  widely  different.  We  are  mining 
more  coal,  making  more  iron,  planting  more  grain,  and 
building  more  locomotives,  houses,  factories  and  work 
shops  than  ever  before.  Labor  is  in  demand,  and  immigra 
tion  increasing  marvellously.  The  prospect  of  steady  work 
and  American  wages,  is  bringing  to  our  shores  workmen 
skilled  in  every  craft,  and  the  assurance  of  a  home  market 
for  their  crops  is  bringing  farmers  from  all  the  countries  of 
Europe  to  settle  among  us.  From  the  number  that  have 
already  arrived,  the  Commissioners  of  Emigration  predict 
that  we  will  receive  this  year  400,000  European  emigrants, 
an  increase  of  70,000  over  any  previous  year.  I  submit  to 
you  the  question,  whether  this  is  not  a  significant  proof  of 
the  happy  effect  of  the  protective  tariff  which  the  exi 
gences  of  the  war  compelled  us  to  adopt.  Under  its 
influence  labor  is  in  demand,  and  the  laborer  is  steadily 
becoming  more  independent ;  and  if  we  perfect  and  main 
tain  a  system  of  thorough  protection,  you  will  be  able  to 
establish  and  maintain  the  eight-hour  system.  This  will 
compel  other  nations  to  follow  our  benificent  example,  or 
behold  their  best  workmen  and  most  enterprising  farmers 
leave  their  shores  and  come  to  swell  the  power  of  the  great 
Republic.  To  ascertain  how  the  existing  tariff  may  be 
improved  is  the  duty  with  which  the  Committee  of  Ways 
and  Means  is  charged,  and  to  which  my  colleagues  and  I 
expect  to  devote  the  entire  vacation.  The  results  of  our 
labor  must  promote  your  objects.  It  is  already  apparent 
to  the  Committee  that  the  administration  of  the  law  can  be 
much  improved,  and  that  many  articles,  especially  of  tropi 
cal  growth,  which  we  do  not  produce,  but  which  enter  as 
raw  material  into  many  of  our  manufactures,  and  upon 
which  duties  are  now  collected,  should  be  admitted  free. 

Four  millions  of  laboring  people,  who,  from  the  founda 
tions  of  our  government,  have  been  used  to  antagonize 
your  interests,  are  now  free  to  co-operate  with  you.  They 
were  slaves,  and  their  emancipation  has  not  only  enabled 
them  to  assert  their  right  to  just  wages  for  their  labor,  but 
opened  as  a  new  field  to  free  labor  that  portion  of  our  coun 
try  which  is  richest  in  combined  agricultural  and  mineral 


232  THE   EIGHT-HOUR   SYSTEM. 

resources,  but  from  which  trade  societies  and  free  schools 
for  the  children  of  working  people  have  always  been  ex 
cluded.  The  results  of  this  great  change  must  soon  be 
widely  felt.  Slaves,  could  not  without  danger  to  slavery, 
be  trained  to  skilled  labor.  Therefore  the  South  produced 
only  raw  materials,  and  her  statesmen,  desiring  the  markets 
of  the  world  in  which  to  sell  their  cotton  and  tobacco,  and 
to  buy  their  supply  of  manufactured  goods,  always  sup 
ported  free  trade  at  the  cost  of  the  commercial  indepen 
dence  of  the  country,  and  the  interests  of  the  working  peo 
ple  of  the  North.  The  war  against  slavery  was  waged  not 
more  for  the  enslaved  negro  than  for  the  rights  of  free 
labor. 

To  the  second  question  I  reply,  that,  inasmuch  as  I  be 
lieve  that  public  officers  are  bound  to  obey  the  law,  I  am 
compelled  to  sustain  the  order  of  the  Secretary  of  the 
Navy.  The  law  of  1862  provides  "  that  the  hours  of  labor 
and  the  rate  of  wages  of  the  employees  in  the  Navy  Yards 
shall  conform,  as  nearly  as  is  consistent  with  the  public  in 
terests,  with  those  of  private  establishments  in  the  imme 
diate  vicinity  of  the  respective  yards."  This  act  is  still 
in  force,  and  the  Solicitor  of  the  Navy  and  the  Attorney- 
General,  to  whom  the  question  has  been  referred,  have  ad 
vised  the  Secretary  and  President  Grant,  that  under  its  pro 
visions  the  Government  cannot  legally  pay  for  eight  hours' 
work  the  same  wages  that  are  paid  for  ten  hours  by  private 
establishments  in  the  immediate  vicinity  of  the  yards  respec 
tively.  If,  therefore,  men  who  work  in  Navy  Yards  are  to 
receive  25  per  cent,  more  than  they  would  get  for  the  same 
work  in  private  establishments,  the  act  of  1862  must  be 
repealed.  That  can  only  be  done  by  Congress.  Neither 
the  Secretary  of  the  Navy,  nor  the  President,  has  the  power 
to  repeal  a  law  or  the  right  to  disregard  one. 

Though  none  of  youvhave  put  the  question  to  me  directly, 
some  of  you  will  now  ask,  will  you  vote  for  the  repeal  of 
this  act  ?  I  regret  that  I  do  not  feel  able  to  answer  this 
question  definitely.  As  at  present  advised,  my  judgment 
is  against  its  repeal ;  but  on  either  of  two  conditions,  I  will 
vote  for  it.  The  first  of  these  conditions  is,  that  it  shall  be 
made  apparent  to  me  that  the  tax-payers  of  my  district, 
including  the  women  and  children,  who  labor  in  factories 
ten  hours  or  more  to  the  day,  believe  that  the  men  who 
work  in  Navy  Yards  are  entitled  to  25  per  cent,  more  wages 
for  the  same  work  than  the  same  class  of  workmen  receive 
in  private  establishments  in  Philadelphia 


THE   EIGHT-HOUR  SYSTEM.  283 

The  other  condition  is,  that  I  shall  be  convinced  that  the 
repeal  of  the  act  in  question  will  promote  the  acceptance 
of  the  eight-hour  system  in  private  shops  or  yards.  Private 
establishments  compete  with  each  other  and  with  those  of 
other  countries  in  the  sale  of  their  productions.  But  the 
Government  does  not  manufacture  for  a  market,  and,  there 
fore,  could  not  be  cited  as  an  example  of  the  successful 
working  of  the  system. 

If  the  Government  adopts  this  rule  in  advance  of  indi 
vidual  employers,  you  will  find  that  all  work  that  can  be 
done  in  private  shops  will  be  sent  there,  and  the  number 
of  hands  employed  in  Navy  Yards  will  be  very  limited. 
Congress,  while  struggling  to  reduce  our  colossal  debt, 
will  not  require  much  work  to  be  done  at  League  Island, 
or  any  other  station,  if  25  per  cent,  above  the  average 
market  rate  is  to  be  paid  for  every  day's  work. 

But  neither  time  nor  printer's  space  will  permit  me  to 
present  all  the  considerations  touching  this  question  with 
which  my  mind  is  laboring.  To  such  as  I  have  set  forth  I 
invite  your  candid  consideration.  The  destinies  of  the  work 
ing  people  of  our  country  are  in  their  own  keeping.  I  have 
not  sought  to  flatter  or  propitiate  you.  While  I  remain 
your  representative,  you  are  entitled  to  know  my  views 
on  questions  which  many  of  you  regard  as  of  vital  impor 
tance  ;  and  I  have  written  frankly,  withholding  no  word 
that  candor  requires  me  to  utter.  I  address  you  as  a 
grateful  friend,  and  not  as  a  supplicant  for  further  honors : 
for,  if  I  am  permitted  to  consult  my  own  wishes,  my  con 
nection  with  public  office  will  terminate  with  the  XLIst 
Congress. 

Yours,  very  truly, 

WM.  D.  KELLEY. 
NEW  YORK,  May  19th,  1869. 


MR.  WELLS'   REPORT. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
JANUARY  11,  1870. 

The  House  being  in  the  Committee  of  the  Whole  on  the  state  of 
the  Union — 

Mr.  Kelley  said : 

Mr.  Chairman :  I  have  more  than  once  endeavored  to 
impress  upon  Congress  the  fact  that  fire  is  the  material  force 
or  nervous  power,  and  iron  and  steel  are  the  muscles  of  our 
more  modern  civilization.  The  trip-hammer,  with  its  won 
derful  power  and  more  wonderful  precision  and  delicacy 
of  stroke,  has  supplanted  the  sledge-hammer,  and  circular 
and  gang-saws  do  in  a  day  the  work  at  which  the  hand-saw 
labored  for  months.  Machine  tools,  such  as  lathes,  drills, 
planers,  and  shaping  machines,  impelled  like  the  trip-ham 
mer  and  saws  by  the  unwearying  steam  engine,  itself  a 
mere  embodiment  of  coal  and  iron  ore,  increase  the  perfec 
tion  and  amount  of  the  artisan's  productions  and  relieve 
him  of  the  exhausting  toil  which  shortened  the  life  of  his 
father  and  made  him  prematurely  old. 

Nations,  too,  are  subject  to  these  new  conditions.  How 
ever  free  their  institutions  may  be,  a  people  who  cannot 
supply  their  own  demand  for  iron  and  steel,  but  purchase 
it  from  foreigners,  are  not  independent ;  nor  is  their  de 
pendence  merely  commercial ;  they  are  politically  depend 
ent  ;  and  if  the  nation  on  which  they  depend  for  these 
essential  elements  of  modern  warfare  be  arrogant  and 
treacherous,  as  England  proved  herself  during  our  late 
civil  war,  they  must  endure  contumely  and  outrage  with 
unresisting  humility.  Commerce  and  war  both  demand 
iron  ships ;  we  tell  the  weight  of  our  guns,  whether  of  steel 
or  iron,  by  the  ton,  and  that  of  our  steel-pointed  shot  by 
the  hundred  weight ;  and  while  we  depend  upon  her  for 
the  material  of  which  to  construct  ships,  guns,  and  shot, 
the  statesmen  of  England  know  they  can  trifle  with  and 
postpone  the  settlement  of  the  Alabama  claims.  Able  as 
284 


MR.  WELLS'  REPORT.  285 

we  were  to  crush  with  irresistible  power  a  gigantic  rebel 
lion,  they  know  that  until  we  shall  have  enough  furnaces, 
forges,  rolling-mills,  machine-shops,  and  skilled  artisans 
to  produce  and  fashion  a  supply  of  iron  and  steel  sufficient 
for  our  wants  in  peace  and  war,  we  cannot  engage  in  war 
with  England  because  we  must  depend  on  her  for  these 
primary  essentials  to  successful  modern  warfare.* 

I  am  impelled  to  renew  these  suggestions  by  the  report 
of  David  A.Weils,  Esq.,  Special  Commissioner  of  Eevenue, 
which  abounds  in  propositions  inimical  to  the  best  interests 
of  the  country,  which  if  adopted  by  Congress  will  compel 
us  to  occupy  a  subordinate  position  among  nations,  though 
our  population  may  equal  that  of  all  Europe,  as  our 
territory  already  does  that  of  the  whole  family  of  European 
Powers.  As  I  read  page  after  page  of  this  extraordinary 
paper  I  became  more  earnestly  anxious  to  detect  the  full 
force  of  its  suggestions,  and,  if  possible,  to  divine  the 
motive  or  spirit  that  prompted  them.  As  an  expression 
of  the  opinions  of  Mr.  Wells  this  paper  can  do  but  little 
harm,  but  its  circulation  in  Europe  under  the  sanction 
of  Congress  may  impair  our  credit  and  arrest  the  tide 
of  immigration  now  flowing  in  upon  us  in  unprecedented 
volume.  It  is  in  the  nature  of  a  notice  to  the  capitalists  of 
Europe  that  as  a  people,  notwithstanding  the  amazing 

*  "The  great  mind  of  Washington  was  not  too  slow  to  make  this  discovery. 
And  what  did  we  also  discover  in  our  war  of  1812,  but  that  we  had  nothing  to 
equip  the  w;ir?  Having  no  woolen  manufacture,  we  could  not  clothe  our 
soldiers  ;  we  could  not  even  make  a  blanket.  We  had  been  free-traders,  buying 
all  such  things  because  we  could  buy  them  cheaper;  but  we  now  discovered, 
that  we  might  better  have  been  making  blankets  at  double  the  cost  for  the  last 
fifty  years.  The  same  was  true  of  saltpetre  for  gunpowder;  of  guns,  and  cannon 
and  swords;  and  iron  and  steel  out  of  which  to  make  them.  A  nation  that  is  to 
be  a  power  must  have  at  least  a  sufficient  supply  of  iron  made  at  home,  no 
matter  what  the  cost,  to  arm  itself  for  war.  We  began  also  to  make  the 
discovery,  shortly,  that  the  very  insignificant  article  of  salt,  coming  in  short 
supply,  was  nearly  a  dead  necessity — one  of  the  munitions  of  war — and  that 
manufacturing  it  for  ourselves  at  double  the  cost  would  have  been  a  true 
advantage.  .  .  ......  ... 

"Protection,  though  it  be  a  losing  bargain,  as  in  trade,  is  generally  necessary 
in  States  that  are  young,  in  order  to  their  full  organized  development.  We  were 
a  young  nation  in  the  war  of  1812,  and  we  very  soon  discovered  in  facts  already 
referred  to,  the  lowness  of  our  organization,  and  the  very  incomplete  scope  of 
our  industrial  equipments.  Our  products  were  not  various  enough  to  make  us  a 
complete  nation.  It  is  often  urged  as  the  special  advantage  of  young  nations, 
that  they  can  have  the  benefits  of  free  trade,  without  trouble  from  the  shock  that 
must  be  given  to  old  artificial  investments;  but  we  had  another  kind  of  shock  to 
bear  that  was  far  more  perilous,  from  the  scant  equipment  in  which  our  previous 
free-trade  practice  had  left  us.  Perhaps  we  were  gaining  in  wealth  by  such 
trade,  but  we  were  miserably  unprepared  by  it  for  the  stress  of  our  great  public 
trial." — Rev.  Horace  Bunhnell,  D.  />.,  *'  Free  Trade  and  Protection."  (Scribner't 
Magazine,  for  July,  1871.) 


286  MR.  WELLS'  REPORT. 

expansion  of  our  country,  we  are  tending  toward  bank 
ruptcy  ;  and  to  the  oppressed  laborers  of  other  lands,  that 
our  working  people  are  becoming  from  year  to  year,  not 
only  relatively  but  absolutely  poorer,  and  that  this  is  there 
fore  not  the  country  to  which  poor  but  aspiring  men 
should  emigrate.  It  demonstrates  to  the  satisfaction  of 
Mr.  Wells'  admirers  and  clients  that  though  our  wealth 
increased  during  the  last  decade  one  hundred  and  twenty- 
six  per  cent.,  its  utmost  increase  during  this  decade  can  be 
but  sixty -five  and  eight  hundreths  per  cent. ;  and  that  the 
grand  total  of  our  real  and  personal  property  cannot  be 
over  $23,400,000,000  * 

Time  will  not  permit  me  to  point  out  the  fallacies  in 
this  portion  of  his  report,  as  I  would  gladly  do ;  and  I 
proceed  at  once  to  invite  the  attention  of  the  committee  to 
points  which  seem  to  require  more  special  animadversion. 
But,  before  turning  to  these,  let  me  request  gentlemen 
from  Massachusetts,  Ohio,  Indiana,  and  New  York,  if  they 
have  not  already  done  so,  to  turn  to  pages  24  et  seq.,  and 
learn  how  rapidly  their  respective  States  are  sinking  into 
poverty,  and  how  much  poorer  their  people  are  per  capita 
than  they  were  in  1860.  The  suggestion  will  doubtless 
surprise  them ;  yet  so  cunningly  does  Mr.  Wells  present  it 

*  Mr.  Wells  is  the  oracle  of  revenue  reformers,  and  this  furnishes  an  apt  illus 
tration  of  his  accuracy,  as  his  statement  of  the  rate  of  increase  was  not  much 
more  than  50  per  cent,  out  of  the  way. 

"  Deducting  the  value  of  the  then  slave  property,  the  real  and  personal  estate 
of  this  country,  as  shown  by  the  census  of  18tfO,  amounted  in  round  numbers  to 
$14,000,000,000,  being  about  $8,000,000,000  in  excess  of  the  valuation  of  1850. 
'Much,  however,  of  this  large  increase,'  as  we  have  since  been  told  by  Com 
missioner  Wells,  'is  known  to  have  been  due  to  more  accurate  methods  of  enum 
eration,  and  to  the  inclusion  of  many  elements  previously  left  unnoticed.' 
Allowing  for  this,  the  increase  of  the  decade  could  scarcely  have  exceeded 
$6,000,000,  and  is,  indeed,  estimated  by  the  Commissioner  at  even  less  than  this 
amount. 

"  Thus  far  the  Census  Bureau  has  given  us  no  estimate  of  the  property  of  1870  ; 
but  from  a  valuable  document  just  now  published  by  the  Bureau  of  Statistics, 
and  for  which  we  are  indebted  to  the  labors  of  its  head,  Mr.  Edward  Young,  we 
learn  that  it  will  be  shown  to  be  about  $800  per  head,  giving,  of  course,  thirty- 
one  thousand  millions  as  the  total  amount,  and  exhibiting  an  increase  of  proba 
bly  seventeen  thousand  millions  in  a  decade,  nearly  one-half  of  which  had  been 
years  of  war,  accompanied  by  a  waste  of  life  and  property  such  as  had  been 
rarely  ever  equalled. 

"Through  the  decade  1850-60,  there  was  none  of  the  waste  of  war.  Peace 
prevailing,  eight  millions  were  added  to  the  numbers  of  our  people,  and  yet  the 
addition  to  our  wealth  amounted  to  but  six  thousand  millions,  or  about  $750  per 
Iread  of  the  then  added  population. 

"Throughout  the  last  decade  there  was  a  waste  of  war  estimated  by  Commis- 
eioner  Wells  at  no  less  than  nine  thousand  millions.  The  addition  to  our  num 
bers  proves  to  be  but  seven  millions,  and  yet  the  growth  of  wealth  has  been 
seventeen  hundred  millions,  or  about  $2500  for  each  head  of  the  added  popu 
lation." — Forney's  Press,  June  15th,  1871. 


MR.  WELLS'  REPORT.  287 

that  foreigners  who  are  not  familiar  with  the  truth  so 
patent  to  every  observer  will  be  deceived  by  it  and  fee) 
they  had  better — 

"  Bear  those  ills  they  have, 
Than  fly  to  others  that  they  know  not  of." 

One  of  the  processes  by  which  Mr.  Wells  sustains  his 
theory,  though  not  wanting  in  ingenuity,  is  very  simple. 
It  is  to  assume  that  everything  is  now  worth  from  thirty- 
five  to  thirty- nine  per  cent,  less  than  it  was  at  the  time 
with  which  he  proposes  his  comparison.  We  know  that 
wheat  and  flour  and  every  variety  of  cotton  and  woolen 
goods  are  cheaper  now  than  they  were  in  1860.  But  Mr. 
Wells'  theory  is,  that  as  there  is  a  difference  in  the  market 
value  of  gold  and  greenbacks,  commodities  of  domestic 
production  ought  to  be  dearer ;  and  applying  his  theory 
to  such  facts  as  he  sees  fit  to  present,  he  assumes  that  they 
are  dearer,  and  so  establishes  the  melancholy  warning  to 
all  persons  proposing  to  emigrate  that  this  is  not  the 
country  to  which  they  should  come.  No  demonstration 
of  the  falsity  of  his  theory  or  of  its  absurdity  induces  him 
to  halt,  but  in  spite  of  these  he  presses  onward  and  applies 
it  in  every  case.  When  examining  his  last  annual  report 
I  confronted  him  with  the  large  accumulation  of  deposits 
in  the  savings-banks  as  evidence  that  the  workingmen  of 
the  country  were  not  then,  as  he  asserted,  "growing  poorer, 
while  the  rich  were  growing  richer,"  and,  after  a  year's 
reflection,  he  answers  my  array  of  facts  in  this  wise : 

"Again,  the  returns  of  savings-banks  are  often  referred  to  as 
showing  a  highly  prosperous  condition  of  the  masses.  Properly 
considered,  however,  they  indicate  a  very  different  state  of  things. 
Thus,  the  first  and  almost  the  only  fact  which  attracts  the  attention 
of  a  mere  superficial  observer  in  examining  these  statistics  is  a  large 
apparent  increase  in  deposits  from  1860  to  1868  or  1869.  But  an 
intelligent  examination  will  at  once  show  that  a  very  great  part  of 
the  apparent  accumulation  referred  to  is  mere  inflation.  For  exam 
ple,  let  us  take  the  case  of  Massachusetts,  where  the  conditions  for 
increase  would  seem  to  be  most  favorable : 

In  1860  the  savings-banks  deposits  in  this 

State  were,  in  round  numbers $45,000,000 

In  January,  1869,  in  currency,  $95,000,000, 
or  in  gold  at  133 71,000,000 

Increase  in  eight  years $26,000,000 

or  $6,000,000  less  than  the  aggregate  deposits  of  1860  would  have 
amounted  to  in  the  same  time  at  a  compound  interest  of  seven 


288  MR.  WELLS'  REPORT. 

per  cent.  ;  or  in  other  words,  the  deposits  of  1860  were  not  made 
jrood  in  1869,  without  reference  to  the  increase  of  population,  even 
if  we  reckon  only  their  natural  increase  at  compound  interest.  It  is 
evident,  therefore,  that  some  cause  has  eaten  into  the  accumulation 
which  existed  eight  years  previously,  and  has  occasioned  the  with 
drawal  of  a  portion  of  that  accumulation." 

If  this  statement  be  fair  the  deposits  in  the  savings- 
banks  of  the  country  fluctuated  fearfully  on  the  24th  of 
September  last,  when  gold  ranged  from  123  to  165  in  an 
hour,  and  such  of  the  depositors  as  were  in  that  end  of  the 
New  York  gold-room  where  it  was  selling  at  135  were 
vastly  richer  than  those  who  were  at  the  same  moment  in 
the  other  end  at  which  Albert  Spires  was  buying  it  for 
160.  A  story  told  in  connection  with  Mr.  Spires' 
operations  on  that  occasion  seems  to  me  to  illustrate  the 
value  of  Mr.  Wells'  theory.  It  is  said  that  a  young  man 
without  capital  who  had  found  his  way  to  membership 
of  the  gold  exchange,  but  had  been  bankrupted  even  of 
credit  by  the  operations  of  the  preceding  day  or  two,  stood 
near  Mr.  Spires,  and  as  that  gentleman  cried  "  One  sixty 
for  one  million,"  tapped  him  on  the  shoulder  and  said, 
"  Taken."  "  Same  price  for  two  millions  more,"  cried 
Spires.  " Taken,"  said  the  young  bankrupt;  and  so  until 
Spires  had  bid,  and  he  taken  his  bids  for  $13,000,000. 
They  then  separated,  and  the  young  bankrupt  drawing 
aside,  with  a  pencil  calculated  upon  the  back  of  a  letter 
his  profits,  and  turning  to  a  friend  triumphantly  exclaimed 
11 1  have  just  made  $750,000  out  of  old  Spires."  ."  Why," 
said  a  by-stander,  "  you  do  not  expect  to  get  any  of  it,  do 
you  ?  "  "  No  ;  certainly  not,"  said  he,  "  but,  blast  him,  I 
thought  I  would  give  him  gold  enough."  This  operation 
between  a  lunatic  and  a  bankrupt,  neither  of  whom  owned 
a  dollar  of  gold,  and  by  which  neither  forfeited  a  cent, 
had  about  as  much  relation  to  their  fortunes  as  the  market 
price  of  gold  has  upon  the  price  of  domestic  commodities, 
or  deposits  in  the  banks  to  which  Mr.  Wells  applies  it. 

In  further  proof  of  its  absurdity  I  invite  attention  to  the 
fact  that  if  his  theory  be  correct  the  depositors  in  the 
savings-banks  of  Massachusetts  have  by  no  effort  of  their 
own,  without  increase  of  industry  or  unusual  economy  on 
their  part,  but  by  his  magic  power,  acquired,  since  the  pre 
paration  of  his  report,  more  than  $9,000,000,  as  gold  is  now 
not  at  133  but  at  120;  and  that  they  will,  if  they  do  not 
make  haste  and  withdraw  their  deposits,  and  we  go  on  as 


MR.  WELLS'  REPORT.  289 

we  have  gone  for  the  last  two  or  three  months  under  the 
financial  management  of  Grant  and  Boutwell,  soon  make 
$15,000,000  more  in  the  same  easy,  and,  I  fear,  unhallowed 
way ;  for  when  gold  comes  to  par  even  Mr.  Wells,  with 
all  his  ingenious  effrontery,  will  not  deny  that  having 
been  able  to  maintain  a  deposit  of  but  $45,000,000  in  1860, 
they  have  in  eight  years  become  able  to  maintain  one  of 
$95,000,000,  which  amount  they  may  draw  in  gold  or 
redeemable  currency,  though  they  deposited  greenbacks 
when  gold  was  at  more  than  200.  Before  parting  with 
this  subject  I  beg  leave  to  inform  the  committee  and  Com 
missioner  Wells  that  at  the  close  of  1869  the  aggregate 
deposits  at  rest  in  the  savings-banks  of  Massachusetts  were 
not  as  he  states  $95,000,000,  but  $112,000,000,  showing 
that  the  laboring  people  of  that  State,  who  he  says  are 
eating  up  their  former  savings  so  rapidly,  have  added 
$17,000,000  to  their  interest  bearing  investment  during  the 
last  year. 

The  prominent  characteristics  of  Mr.  Wells'  report  are 
audacity  and  devotion  to  the  interests  of  England  and  her 
American  colonies.  That  it  is  ingenious  and  plausible 
cannot  be  denied  ;  but  that  it  is  so  does  not  in  my  judgment 
furnish  proof  of  the  Commissioner's  ability  or  evidence 
of  his  possession  of  well-grounded  convictions  on  indus 
trial  questions.  Indeed,  the  fact  that  many  of  the  sugges 
tions  which  are  most  earnestly  pressed  contravene  those 
embodied  in  his  former  reports,  and  his  avowal  that  in 
offering  them  "he  has  placed  himself  in  antagonism  to 
many  with  whom  he  was  formerly  in  close  agreement," 
afford  ample  ground  for  doubt  on  both  points. 

"  Kemember,  gentlemen,"  said  the  experienced  merchant 
who  now  so  ably  fills  the  office  of  collector  of  the  port  of 
New  York,  when  conferring  with  the  Committee  of  Ways 
and  Means,  "  that  the  legal  ability  of  England  and  the  con 
tinent  is  constantly  retained  by  foreign  manufacturers  to 
indicate  the  means  by  which  your  tariffs  may  be  evaded." 
Mr.  Wells  visited  our  transatlantic  rivals  in  his  official 
capacity,  and  while  among  them  doubtless  availed  himself 
of  the  ability  of  their  large  array  of  able  and  well-paid  coun 
sel.  Whether  he  also  was  retained  is  for  the  present  the 
subject  of  conjecture.  But  that  he  enforces  as  "opinions 
and  recommendations  which  have  been  forced  upon  him  by 
conviction,"  the  wishes  of  the  English  manufacturers,  there 
is  abundant  evidence  in  his  report,  as  I  propose  to  show. 
19 


290  MR.   WELLS'  REPORT. 

The  most  audacious  of  Mr.  Wells'  assertions,  and  one 
that  pervades  the  whole  report,  is  that  customs  duties  are 
always  a  tax  on  the  consumer,  increasing  the  price  of  the 
imported  article  on  which  they  are  levied,  and  enabling  the 
home  producer  to  realize  undue  profits  by  keeping  pro 
duction  steadily  below  the  current  demand  for  the  com 
modity  he  produces.  Were  Mr.  Wells  a  tyro,  and  this 
report  his  first  publication,  charity  would  deem  this  a 
blunder  and  ascribe  it  to  ignorance ;  but  he  is  a  man  of 
large  experience,  and  has  written  much,  and  reference  to 
any  of  the  publications  which  led  to  his  appointment  to 
the  commissionership,  or  to  his  preceding  reports,  will 
convict  him  of  basing  this  official  paper  on  a  principle,  the 
falsity  of  which  he  has  time  and  again  demonstrated.  His 
bad  faith  in  this  is  proven,  I  think,  by  a  single  extract 
from  his  report  made  December,  1867,  in  which,  speaking 
of  the  higher  duties  he  then  advised  Congress  to  put  on 
steel,  he  said  :* 

"  On  steel  much  higher  rates  of  duty  than  those  recommended 
upon  iron  are  submitted.  Although  these  rates  seem  much  higher, 
and  are  protested  against  by  not  a  few  American  consumers  of  steel, 
yet  the  evidence  presented  to  the  Commissioner  tends  to  establish 
the  fact  that  if  any  less  are  granted,  the  development  of  a  most  im 
portant  and  desirable  branch  of  domestic  industry  will,  owing  to  the 
present  currency  derangement  and  the  high  price  and  scarcity  of 
skilled  labor,  be  arrested,  if  not  entirely  prostrated.  This  is  claimed 
to  be  more  especially  true  in  regard  to  steel  of  the  higher  grades  or 
qualities.  It  is  also  represented  to  the  Commissioner  that,  since  the 
introduction  of  the  manufacture  of  these  grades  of  steel  in  the  United 
States,  or  since  1859,  the  price  of  foreign  steel  of  similar  qualities  has 
been  very  considerably  reduced  through  the  effect  of  the  American 
competition,  and  that  the  whole  country  in  this  way  has  gained  more 
than  sufficient  to  counterbalance  the  tax  levied  as  a  protection  for  the 
American  steel  manufacture,  which  has  grown  up  under  its  in- 


*  Mr.  Wells'  recommendation  of  increased  duties,  in  his  report  for  1867,  was 
not  confined  to  steel,  but  embraced  almost  every  article  we  produce.  And  in  his 
report  for  1&68,  he  did  but  point  out  the  results  of  the  system  of  protection, 
which,  sinee  his  visit  to  England,  he  assails  and  endeavors  to  betray,  when  he 
said  : 

"  More  cotton  spindles  have  been  put  in  operation,  more  iron  furnaces  erected, 
more  iron  smelted,  more  bars  rolled,  more  steel  made,  more  coal  and  copper 
mined,  more  lumber  sawed  and  hewn,  more  houses  and  shops  constructed,  more 
manufactories  of  different  kinds  started,  and  more  petroleum  collected,  refined, 
and  exported,  than  during  any  equal  period  in  the  history  of  the  country  j  and 
this  increase  has  been  great  both  as  regards  quality  and  quantity,  and  greater 
than  the  legitimate  increase  to  be  expected  from  the  normal  increase  of  wealth 
and  population." 


MB.  WELLS'  REPORT.  291 

Mr.  Wells  can  dispute  none  of  the  facts  asserted  in  the 
extract  just  read,  which  prove  that  he  knows  that  prior 
to  the  close  of  1867,  highly  protective  duties  on  steel  had 
not  been  a  tax  on,  but  a  boon  to  the  consumer ;  so  great 
a  boon,  indeed,  that,  by  enlarging  the  supply  and  increas 
ing  competition,  they  had  so  far  reduced  the  price  of  steel 
that,  to  quote  his  words  again,  "  the  whole  country  in  this 
way  has  gained  more  than  sufficient  to  counterbalance  the 
tax  levied  as  a  protection  for  the  American  steel  manufac 
ture,  which  has  grown  up  under  its  influence." 

You,  Mr.  Chairman,  and  many  of  our  co-laborers  on  this 
floor,  are  interested  in  the  extension  and  improvement  of 
our  magnificent  railroad  system,  and  I  propose  to  illustrate 
the  treachery  of  the  Commissioner  by  briefly  referring  to 
the  effect  of  high  protective  duties  on  Bessemer  steel  rails. 
In  1864,  there  was  no  establishment  in  the  United  States 
for  the  manufacture  of  such  rails.  The  lowest  price  at 
which  an  American  company  could  buy  them  in  England 
was  $150  per  ton  cash,  gold,  including  freight  to  New 
York  or  Philadelphia.  No  English  maker  would  sell  them 
at  less.  Agents  of  the  Pennsylvania  Central,  and  Phila 
delphia,  Wilmington  and  Baltimore  roads,  went  abroad 
and  canvassed  the  market,  and  having  been  assured  that 
such  rails  could  not  be  produced  and  sold  at  a  living  profit 
for  a  lower  price  than  this,  purchased  a  small  quantity  for 
each  company.  The  duty  was  then,  as  now,  an  ad  valorem 
duty  of  forty-five  per  cent.,  which  at  that  price  was  equiva 
lent  to  about  three  cents  a  pound.  Gold  was  then  above 
200,  and  each  ton  of  rails  had  cost  when  laid  on  the  wharf 
in  Philadelphia,  $390,  currency. 

Our  country  abounds  in  the  materials  from  which  to 
make  not  only  Bessemer  rails,  but  every  quality  of  steel, 
and  the  wages  paid  to  American  workmen  are  high  enough 
to  tempt  skilled  workmen  from  England  and  Germany ;  and 
in  view  of  these  facts,  several  enterprising  railroad  men  de 
termined  to  establish  Bessemer  rail  works.  This  was  not 
to  be  done  in  a  day.  It  required  the  selection  of  a  judi 
cious  site,  the  erection  of  extensive  buildings,  and  the  con 
struction  of  a  large  amount  of  machinery,  which  consumed 
considerably  more  than  a  year.  During  all  this  time  the 
price  of  English  rails  remained  at  $150  cash,  gold,  per  ton 
delivered  on  the  wharf  in  America.  But  at  length  the 
Freedom  Works,  at  Harrisburg,  Pennsylvania,  so-called  in 
commemoration  of  our  partial  enfranchisement  from  the 


292 

grasp  of  foreign  monopolists,  were  ready  to  take  orders, 
and  another  establishment  for  their  production  was  erecting 
at  Troy,  New  York,  when  lo !  the  same  English  manufac 
turers,  who  had  been  unable  to  sell  at  less  than  $150  per 
ton,  canvassed  our  market  to  find  buyers  at  $130.  What 
wrought  this  great  change  ?  Had  the  Commissioner's  Eng 
lish  friends  been  making  profits  oft'  our  railroad  companies 
greater  than  he  ascribes  to  our  producers  of  salt,  pig-iron, 
lumber,  and  other  things  essential  to  national  independence  ; 
or  were  they  willing  to  sacrifice  the  profit  on  a  small  part 
of  their  product  in  order  to  crush  an  infant  rival,  whose 
development  they  feared  ?  Be  this  as  it  may,  in  less  than 
four  years  competition  has  brought  the  price  of  Bessemer 
rails  down  so  rapidly,  that  orders  are  now  taken  in  England 
at  eleven  pounds  sterling,  or  about  fifty-five  dollars,  deliv 
erable  at  Liverpool  or  Hull.  Meanwhile,  mills  for  their 
production  at  Troy,  New  York,  Chester,  Pennsylvania, 
Cleveland,  Ohio,  and  Detroit,  Michigan,  have  been  com 
pleted  ;  and  the  plans  have  been  adopted  for  others  at  Mott 
Haven,  New  York ;  Pittsburg,  Johnstown,  and  Bethlehem, 
Pennsylvania ;  and  at  Baltimore,  Cincinnati,  and  St.  Louis: 
but  their  construction  awaits  and  is  dependent  on  the  action 
of  Congress  on  the  tariff.  These  facts  are  known  to  Mr. 
Wells,  yet  he  endeavors  to  persuade  the  country  that  a  pro 
tective  duty  is  always  a  tax  on  the  consumer,  and  labors  tc 
induce  Congress  to  reduce  a  duty  which  was  at  the  rate  of 
three  cents  to  one  of  one  and  a  half  cent  per  pound ;  a 
change  which  he  well  knows  would  close  all  our  Bessemer 
rail  works,  and  restore  to  his  English  friends  the  monopoly 
of  our  market,  at  such  prices  as  they  might  demand.  What 
can  have  brought  him  to  such  a  conclusion  ?  What  is  to 
be  his  reward  for  such  a  consummation? 

If  gentlemen  will  turn  to  page  125  of  the  report,  they 
will  find  a  schedule  presenting  a  classification  of  steel,  and 
proposed  rates  of  duty  on  each  class.  It  purports  to  be 
Mr.  Wells'  own  suggestion,  and  is  submitted  with  all  the 
emphasis  that  the  abundant  resort  to  italics  can  give.  I 
hope  gentlemen  will  examine  it,  for  I  think  that,  with  its 
private  history,  it  furnishes  a  clew  to  his  change  of  views 
on  the  question  as  to  whether  a  protective  duty  that  de 
velops  a  great  industry  is  a  tax,  and  his  Saul-like  conversion 
on  the  steel  question.  For  nearly  a  quarter  of  a  century 
our  duties  on  cast-steel  have  been  assessed  upon  the  value 
of  the  commodity,  or  ad  valorem]  and  recent  investigation 


MR.    WELLS1     REPORT.  293 

by  an  agent  of  the  Government  has  shown  that  throughout 
the  whole  of  the  period  the  steel-makers  of  Sheffield,  by 
refusing  to  sell  directly  to  American  purchasers  and  con 
signing  their  goods  to  agents  in  this  country  for  sale, 
by  which  cunning  arrangement  they  could  successfully 
practice  a  system  of  undervaluation,  have  been  defrauding 
the  Government  of  a  large  portion  of  its  dues. 

The  Sheffield  steel-makers  are  men  of  wealth  and  social 
position,  and  this  discovery  of  their  long-continued  and 
systematic  fraud  upon  our  Government  has  not  been  a 
pleasant  thing  for  them.  The  charge  is  distasteful  to  them. 
A  combination  to  cheat  and  defraud  has  an  ugly  sound. 
They  squirm  under  it,  and  admit  that  steel  has  been  in 
voiced  to  the  United  States  at  lower  rates  than  those  at 
which  they  sell  in  England  or  to  the  people  of  the  Conti 
nent,  but  assert  that,  low  as  the  invoice  prices  have  been, 
they  are  the  prices  at  which  they  sell  in  this  country. 
Good,  kind-hearted,  benevolent  people !  How  they  do 
love  the  Yankees !  To  be  willing  to  sell  them  their  wares 
cheaper  than  they  will  to  their  own  countrymen  or  to  any 
of  the  people  of  Europe  !  Have  they  any  reason  for  doing 
so,  or  do  they  pretend  to  have  any  ?  Yes ;  they  are  not 
without  a  show  of  reason.  They  say — and  their  letters  are 
on  file  in  the  Treasury  Department,  and  their  agents  have 
appeared  there  to  enforce  the  statement — that  our  market  is 
essential  to  the  maintenance  of  their  works,  and  that  such  is  the 
competition  they  encounter  from  our  steel-makers,  that  they  are 
forced  to  sell  to  us  at  lower  rates  than  they  do  to  the  English 
or  any  other  people.  In  a  letter  to  our  consul  at  that  city, 
dated  July  10th,  1869,  Thomas  Firth  &  Son,  of  Sheffield, 
say : 

"  We  have  a  very  large  steel  trade  in  America,  amounting  to  a 
large  proportion  of  our  whole  business,  and  in  that  market  there  is, 
from  various  circumstances,  much  competition ;  and  these  two 
causes— large  trade  and  competition  combined — have  induced  us  to  be 
satisfied  with  a  smaller  average  profit  there  than  we  have  realized 
on  the  average  in  our  other  markets." 

Mr.  Wells  has  seen  the  report  referred  to,  that  of  Mr. 
Farwell,  the  Treasury  agent,  and  has  examined,  or  ought  to 
have  examined,  all  the  papers  in  this  controversy,  and  might 
have  cited  them  as  proof  of  the  assertion  in  his  former 
report,  that  the  reduction  in  the  price  of  steel  has  more 
than  compensated  the  American  people  for  all  the  duty 
paid  on  that  article  since  the  establishment  of  our  first  sue- 


29-i  MR.  WELLS'    REPORT. 

cessful  steel  works  in  1859.     But  I  have  been  led  into  a 
digression. 

I  had  said  that  the  discovery  of  their  systematic  frauds 
was  not  a  pleasant  thing  to  the  English  steel -makers,  and 
was  proceeding  to  say  that,  foreseeing  that  it  would  pro 
bably  lead  to  the  abandonment  of  ad  valorem  and  the  levy 
ing  of  specific  duties  on  steel,  they  overwhelmed  the  Secre 
tary  of  the  Treasury  and  other  official  personages  with 
unsolicited,  and,  of  course,  disinterested  advice.  That  we 
should  not  suffer  for  want  of  their  experience,  the  draft  of 
a  bill  providing  a  scale  of  duties  on  steel,  was  prepared,  as 
I  am  informed  and  verily  believe,  by  or  in  consultation  with 
a  member  of  one  of  the  leading  firms  of  steel-makers  of 
Sheffield,  and  sent  over  to  a  gentleman  specially  connected 
with  legislation  on  financial  subjects.  I  have  examined 
the  original  draft  as  it  came  from  Sheffield,  and  have  a 
copy  of  it  before  me.  It  is  a  proposition  by  the  vulture 
to  protect  the  dove.  It  is  plausible  in  its  minute  classifi 
cation.  It  would,  had  it  been  honestly  named,  have  been 
entitled  a  bill  to  prohibit  the  manufacture  of  steel  in  the 
United  States.  It  is,  however,  entitled,  "  A  bill  to  amend 
an  act  entitled  '  An  act  to  increase  duties  on  imports,  and 
for  other  purposes/  approved  June  30,  1864."  It  furnished 
Mr.  Wells  his  schedule  ;  and  that  gentlemen  may  see  how 
completely  he  has  adopted  it,  how  entirely  his  views  on 
this  important  subject  are  in  accord  with  those  of  the  steel 
monopolists  of  England,  whose  interest  it  is  to  hold  us  in 
commercial  and  maritime  dependence,  I  will  ask  the  re 
porters  to  put  the  two  schedules  in  parallel  columns.  It  is, 
perhaps,  due  to  Mr.  Wells,  in  this  connection,  that  I  should 
mention  the  fact  that  he  so  far  exercised  his  own  judgment 
in  making  this  recommendation,  as  to  modify  two  or  three 
unimportant  rates,  and  to  change  the  order  from  that  in 
which  the  items  stand  in  the  English  draft  of  the  bill ;  and 
that  to  make  the  comparison  easy  for  the  readers  of  the 
Globe,  I  have  arranged  them  in  the  order  chosen  by  Mr. 
Wells : 

WELLS'  SCHEDULE.  SHEFFIELD  BILL. 

On  scrap  steel,  ^  cent  per  On  scrap  steel,  ^  cent  per 
pound.  pound. 

On  blister  steel  in  bars  broken  On  blister  steel  in  bars  broken 
up  for  melting,  1£  cents  per  up  for  melting,  l£  cents  per 
pound.  pound.. 

On  German  steel  in  bars,  2  On  German  steel  in  bars,  2 
cents  per  pound.  cents  per  pound. 


MR.  WELLS'  REPORT. 


295 


WELLS'  SCHEDULE. 

On  shear  steel  in  bars,  2£  cents 
per  pound. 

On  cast-steel  ingots  and  on  all 
rough  and  unfinished  castings  in 
steel,  1  cent  per  pound. 

On  castings  in  steel,  drilled, 
bored,  or  hammered  cold,  1£ 
cents  per  pound. 


On  cast-steel  in  bars,  2£  cents 
per  pound. 

On  cast  or  German  steel  in 
plates  to  16  wire  gauge,  inclusive, 
2  cents  per  pound  ;  from  17  to 
24,  2£  cents  per  pound;  above 
24,  3  cents  per  pound. 

On  cast  or  German  steel  in 
form  of  wire  and  sheets  which 
are  drawn  or  rolled  cold  to  16 
wire  gauge,  3  cents  per  pound. 

Thinner  than  16  wire  gauge, 
3|  cents  per  pound. 

On  cast-steel  tires  for  rolling- 
stock  for  railroads,  2  cents  per 
pound. 

On  cast-steel  straight  axles, 
shafts,  piston-rods,  and  general 
forgings  to  pattern,  1  cent  per 
pound. 


Do.  do.  rough-turned, 
per  pound. 


cents 


Do.  do.  finished  ready  for  use, 
2  cents  per  pound. 

On  cast-steel  crank  axles  forged 
to  shape  only,  1£  cents  per  pound. 

On  cast-steel  crank  axles  forged 
to  shape,  rough-turned,  planed, 
and  slotted,  1£  cents  per  pound. 

Do.  do.  finished  ready  for  use, 
2  cents  per  pound. 

On  cast-steel  rails  1£  cents  per 
pound. 

On  steel  not  otherwise  pro 
vided  for,  2  cents  per  pound. 


SHEFFIELD  BILL. 

On  shear  steel  in  bars,  2 £  cents 
per  pound. 

On  cast-steel  ingots,  1  cent  per 
pound. 

On  castings  in  steel  with  holes 
drilled  or  bored,  hammered  or 
turned  or  planed  in  parts,  but  in 
no  case  hammered  or  worked  hot, 
1$  cents  per  pound. 

On  cast-steel  in  bars,  2J-  cents 
per  pound. 

On  cast  or  German  steel  in 
sheets  or  plates  to  No.  23  wire 
gauge,  2£  cents  per  pound. 


On  cast  or  German  steel  in 
form  of  wire  or  strips  which  are 
drawn  or  rolled  cold  to  16  wire 
gauge,  3  cents  per  pound. 

When  drawn  or  rolled  smaller 
than  16  wire  gauge,  3£  cents  per 
pound. 

On  cast  steel  tires  for  rolling 
stock  for  railroads,  2  cents  per 
pound. 

On  cast-steel  straight  axles, 
piston,  connecting  and  coupling- 
rods,  crank-pins,  slide-bars,  and 
general  forgings  to  pattern  only, 
lj  cents  per  pound. 

If  forged  to  shape  and  rough- 
turned  or  planed,  1£  cents  per 
pound. 

If  finished  ready  for  use,  2 
cents  per  pound. 

On  cast-steel  crank-shafts,  if 
forged  to  shape  only,  lj  cents 
per  pound. 

On  cast-steel  crank-shafts,  if 
forged  to  shape,  rough-turned, 
planed,  and  slotted,  1£  cents  per 
pound. 

On  cast-steel  crank-shafts,  if 
forged  to  shape,  finished  ready 
for  use,  2£  cents  per  pound. 

On  cast^steel  rails,  1  cent  per 
pound. 

On  steel  or  manufactures  of 
steel,  not  otherwise  provided  for, 
2|  cents  per  pound. 


296 

It  will  be  observed  that  the  foregoing  schedules  are,  as 
I  intimated,  not  absolutely  identical,  but  they  are  so  nearly 
so  as  to  prevent  Mr.  Wells  from  denying  that  they  sprang 
from  the  same  brain,  and  pleading  the  possibility  of  coin 
cidence — I  do  not  say  the  probability,  but  the  possibility 
of  coincidence — on  so  many  points  of  rate  and  general 
and  technical  phraseology.  And  it  will  be  further  noticed 
that  where  the  slightest  departure  in  rate  occurs  in  any  one 
item,  as  is  the  case  in  two  or  three  unimportant  instances, 
it  is  immediately  compensated  for  in  the  next  item  by  a 
corresponding  change  the  other  way.  Thus,  Mr.  Wells  is 
more  generous  to  his  countrymen  in  the  matter  of  Besse 
mer  rails  than  their  Sheffield  rival  would  be.  He  pro 
poses  to  kill  them  instantly  by  putting  the  rate  at  one 
cent  per  pound  ;  while  Mr.  Wells  is  willing  to  give  them 
breathing  time  in  which  to  put  their  houses  in  order  by 
letting  them  die  slowly  at  one  and  a  half  cents.  And  in 
the  next  item  the  Englishman  proves  the  more  generous ; 
for  he  proposes  two  and  a  half  cents  on  all  steel  and  manu 
factures  of  steel  not  provided  for,  and  Mr.  Wells  would 
crush  his  countrymen  instantly  by  making  the  duty  on 
those  articles  but  two  cents. 

I  cannot  leave  this  branch  of  the  subject  without  saying 
that  I  believe  gentlemen  generally  who  compare  these 
schedules  will  agree  with  me  in  thinking  that  Mr.  Wells' 
Sheffield  employers  have  treated  him  badly,  scurvily.  Har- 
ing  induced  him  to  father  their  project,  so  predjudicial  to 
his  country  and  so  destructive  to  the  business  of  many  of 
his  countrymen,  they  violated  faith  with  him  when  they 
made  their  paternity  of  the  scheme  known  by  sending  a 
copy  of  the  bill  to  official  quarters  in  this  country  in  ad 
vance  of  the  publication  of  his  report. 

PIG-IRON. 

With  all  the  zeal  of  a  new  convert  or  counsel  laboring 
to  secure  a  contingent  fee,  Mr.  Wells  applies  to  pig-iron 
his  assumption  that  a  protective  duty  is  necessarily  a  tax 
on  the  consumer,  and  by  the  plausibility  of  his  argument 
would  make  innocent  and  inexperienced  people  believe 
that  he  really  hoped  to  secure  cheap  pig-iron  by  reducing 
the  duty  on  that  article  from  nine  dollars  a  ton  to  three. 
Could  he  close  our  steel  works,  as  the  acceptance  of  the 
Sheffield  schedule  recommended  by  hirn  would  do  in  three 
months,  and  arrest  the  progress  we  are  making  in  the  in- 


MB.  WELLS'  REPORT.  297 

creased  production  of  pig-iron,  he  would  do  more  to  re 
tard  the  progress  of  his  country  toward  commercial  pros 
perity  and  national  supremacy  than  Davis,  Lee,  and  all  the 
heads  of  the  rebellion  accomplished.  I  cannot  conceive 
the  single  cause  that  would  do  more  to  depress  and  im 
poverish  our  people  and  retard  the  growth  of  our  country 
than  the  sudden  prostration  of  these  great  interests  at  a 
time  when  the  English  or  continental  manufacturer  will 
purchase  none  of  our  grain  for  which  he  has  to  pay  a 
penny  in  advance  of  the  price  for  which  he  can  buy  from 
the  peasants  of  Austria,  Hungary  and  Eussia. 

But  this  recommendation  with  reference  to  pig-iron  is 
consistent  with  the  rest  of  the  report,  throughout  which 
the  desire  is  manifest  to  make  the  United  States  as  com 
mercially  dependent  on  and  tributary  to  England  as  though 
they  were  still  part  of  her  North  American  colonies.  He 
cites  pig-iron,  coal,  salt,  and  lumber  as  illustrations  of  a 
class  of  cases  where  excessive  and  unnecessary  duties  have 
been  imposed  and  maintained  "  with  a  view  of  enhancing  the 
cost  of  articles  indispensable  to  many  other  branches  of  pro 
duction  ;"  and  elsewhere  says  that  the  only  reply  offered  to 
his  assaults  upon  this  great  and  essential  interest  "  is  that 
a  continuance  of  the  present  duty  on  pig-iron  is  necessary 
t'j  insure  employment  to  American  labor." 

I  pause  to  notice  his  assertion,  that  Congress  in  the 
midst  of  a  great  war  imposed  unnecessary  exactions  in 
order  to  increase  the  cost  of  an  article  so  essential  as  iron 
to  the  life  of  the  nation,  simply  to  remark  that  such  an  in 
timation  is  worthy  the  man  who  can  sap  and  mine  the 
great  interests  of  his  country  as  Commissioner  Wells  is 
doing.  The  present  duty  on  pig-iron  was  imposed  for  two 
purposes,  both  of  which  were  patriotic.  The  first  was  to 
raise  additional  revenue,  and  the  other  to  stimulate  the 
conversion  of  ore,  coal,  and  limestone,  of  which  in  almost 
every  part  of  the  country  we  have  inexhaustible  supplies, 
into  a  material  the  increased  production  of  which  was  a 
prerequisite  to  the  general  extension  of  our  industries  and 
the  maintenance  of  the  dignity  and  rights  of  the  nation, 
which  were  then  being  violated  by  the  armed  cruisers  of 
the  country  to  which  we  looked  for  a  supply  of  pig-iron 
and  Bessemer  rails.  And,  sir,  I  am  happy  in  being  able  to 
show  that  it  has  accomplished  both  these  objects,  and  that 
if  permitted  to  stand  for  five  years  it  will,  while  contribut 
ing  largely  to  the  reduction  of  our  debt,  insure  us  not  only 


298  MR.  WELLS'  REPORT. 

a  home  supply  of  pig-iron,  but  such  ample  means  of  pro 
ducing  it  as  will  enable  us  to  enter  the  markets  of  the 
world  in  competition  with  England. 

What  has  it  done  as  a  revenue  measure  ?  During  the 
year  that  ended  on  the  30th  of  June,  1868,  we  derived 
from  this  duty  $1,011,10996;  in  the  succeeding  year, 
closing  on  the  30th  of  June,  1869,  $1,199,762  55  ;  and  in 
the  current  fiscal  year  it  will  give  us  a  still  larger  income, 
without  in  the  slightest  degree  impairing  the  revenue  de 
rived  from  our  consumption  of  foreign  iron  in  more  ad 
vanced  condition.  This  is  shown  by  the  following  state 
ment  of  the  quantities  of  the  various  kinds  of  iron  and 
steel  exported  from  Great  Britain  to  the  United  States  dur 
ing  the  ten  months  ending  October  31st,  of  the  years 
1868-69,  in  tons  of  2000  pounds : 

1868.  1869. 

Iron,  pig  and  puddled 84,564  132,491 

Iron,  bar,  angle,  bolt,  and  rod 38,200  51,738 

Iron,  railroad,  of  all  sorts 255,462  294,368 

Iron  castings 1,213  1,677 

Iron  hoops,  sheets,  and  boiler  plates...  15,999  31,292 

Iron,  wrought  of  all  sorts .-...    4,020  7,364 

Total 399,458  518,930 

Steel,  unwrought 14.847  15,612 

Has  not  the  duty  of  nine  dollars  per  ton  on  pig-iron 
been  eminently  successful  as  a  revenue  measure  ?  I  think 
it  has ;  but  its  most  abundant  success  has  been  in  its 
power  to  increase  the  supply,  improve  the  quality,  and 
lessen  the  cost  of  domestic  pig-iron.  The  Commissioner 
raises  no  question  as  to  the  relative  quality  of  British  and 
American  iron,  and  does  not  state  the  quantity  of  our  an 
nual  production,  except  that  in  one  of  his  hypothetical 
calculations  of  the  values  realized  from  different  depart 
ments  of  industry,  he  places  the  annual  product  for  1869 
at  1,725,000  tons,  or  about  175,000  tons  below  the  ascer 
tained  production  of  that  year.  That  the  average  quality 
of  American  pig,  bar,  and  railroad  iron  is  superior  to  the 
average  of  the  same  descriptions  of  English  iron  is  an 
almost  universally-conceded  fact ;  but  to  blazon  this  to  the 
world  would  not  serve  the  interest  of  the  Commissioner's 
British  friends,  and  he  is  therefore  silent  upon  this  aspect 
of  the  question  also,  though  he  tells  us  with  much  elabora 
tion  what  he  has  been  told  has  been  the  cost  of  production 
per  ton  at  several  points  in  this  country,  and  the  market 
price  per  ton  during  the  year  in  England  and  here. 


MR.  WELLS'  REPORT.  299 

But  though,  his  report  abounds  in  hypotheses  and  calcu 
lations  based  on  estimates  and  suppositions,  he  nowhere 
tells  or  attempts  to  tell  us  what  we  would  have  been  made 
to  pay  the  British  iron  master  for  his  inferior  pig,  bar, 
sheet,  and  rails  if  the  American  production  of  pig-iron  had 
not  been  more  than  doubled  since  the  establishment  of 
this  duty,  and  if  the  manufacture  of  cast-steel  and  Besse 
mer  rails  had  not  also  been  established  at  so  many  points 
within  our  limits  since  the  exigencies  of  the  war  com 
pelled  us  to  adopt  protective  duties.  He  is  not  ignorant  of 
the  fact  that  in  little  more  than  a  year  past  sixty-five  new 
blast  furnaces  have  been  erected,  and  that  they  are  to  em 
ploy  a  portion  of  the  people  of  fifteen  States.  Six  of 
them  are  in  New  York,  one  in  New  Jersey,  nineteen  in 
Pennsylvania,  one  in  Maryland,  four  in  Virginia,  six  in 
Ohio,  five  in  Indiana,  three  in  Illinois,  five  in  Michigan, 
two  in  Wisconsin,  six  in  Missouri,  three  in  Kentucky,  one 
in  Georgia,  two  in  Alabama,  and  one  in  Tennessee.  These 
furnaces  have  increased  our  productive  power  to  nearly  two 
million  five  hundred  thousand  tons  per  annum.  Arrange 
ments  are  also  making  for  the  erection  of  more  than  fifty 
other  furnaces  during  the  year  upon  which  we  have  just 
entered,  many  of  which  have  been  commenced.  The  esti 
mated  product  of  pig-iron  for  this  year  is  two  million  two 
hundred  and  twenty -five  thousand  tons,  or  about  fifty  per 
cent,  of  the  annual  average  production  of  Great  Britain. 

These  facts  are,  I  repeat,  known  to  the  Commissioner ; 
and  he  knows  also  that  by  a  law  as  inevitable  as  that  of 
gravitation  domestic  competition  increasing  in  such  a  ratio 
must  at  an  early  day  bring  down  the  price  of  iron  as  it 
has  that  of  wheat  and  flour,  and  of  knit  and  other  cotton 
and  woolen  goods,  to  a  point  beyond  danger  from  foreign 
competition  ;  a-nd  that  by  thus  relieving  us  from  depen 
dence  on  England  for  the  first  essential  in  a  great  war,  it 
will  also  make  us  her  competitor  in  the  markets  of  the 
world  in  a  field  her  supremacy  in  which  has  hitherto  made 
her  the  commercial  mistress  of  the  world. 

I  will  not  offer  an  estimate  of  what  would  have  been  the 
price  of  pig-iron  had  not  the  necessities  of  the  Govern 
ment  compelled  Congress  to  impose  duties  that  were  pro 
tective  and  which  justified  men  of  enterprise  in  opening 
coal  mines  and  ore-beds  and  erecting  furnaces;  but  to  ena 
ble  gentlemen  to  judge  for  themselves,  I  submit  the  follow 
ing.  On  page  85  of  the  report  I  am  considering  the  Com 
missioner  says  : 


300  MR.  WELLS'  REPORT. 

"  How  great  the  demand  of  the  future  is  likely  to  prove  may  be 
inferred  from  the  circumstance  that  while  the  per  capita  consump 
tion  of  Great  Britain  and  Belgium,  after  allowing  for  exportation, 
has  reached  one  hundred  and  eighty-nine  pounds  per  annum,  the 
present  annual  consumption  of  the  United  States  is  not  in  excess  of 
one  hundred  pounds  per  capita.  No  nation,  furthermore,  at  the 
present  time,  with  the  exception  of  Great  Britain,  is  producing  pig- 
iron  in  sufficient  excess  of  its  needs  to  allow  of  a  surplus  for  expor 
tation  ;  arid  in  Great  Britain  the  prospect  of  any  future  increase  is 
entirely  dependent  upon  the  uncertain  condition  of  her  being  able  to 
supply  coal  on  a  scale  of  consumption  that  is  already  in  excess  of 
one  hundred  and  four  million  tons  per  annum." 

On  page  3  of  his  report  made  January,  1869,  he  tells  us 
that— 

"  In  France  the  annual  product  of  pig-iron  was  in  1866,  1.253,100 
tons,  and  in  1867,  1,142,800  tons,  showing  a  decline  of  110,300  tons. 

"  In  Austria  the  official  returns  of  the  iron  trade  show  a  diminu 
tion  of  forty-two  per  cent,  in  1866  as  compared  with  1860,  and  of 
sixty  per  cent,  as  compared  with  1862." 

In  that  valuable  paper,  the  report  of  A.  S.  Hewitt,  Esq., 
United  States  Commissioner  to  the  Paris  Exposition,  we 
learn  that  ours  is  almost  the  only  country  in  the  world 
that  can  largely  expand  its  production  of  iron.  Mr.  Hewitt 
agrees  with  Mr.  Wells  that  it  is  problematical  as  to  whether 
England  can  for  the  present  increase  her  production  mate 
rially.  He  thinks  she  may  maintain  her  present  position 
among  continental  producers  ;  but  beyond  this  he  does  not 
think  she  can  go,  by  reason  of  the  depth  of  her  mines  and 
the  "intrinsic  difficulties  of  producing  the  required  sup 
ply  of  materials  and  labor,  without  an  enormous  increase 
of  cost." 

The  iron  production  of  the  world  for  1866,  as  stated  by 
Mr.  Hewitt,  was  as  follows  : 


Countries.  ™' 

England  ......................  4,530,051  3,500,000 

France  .........................  1,200,320  844,734 

Belgium  .......................    500,000  400,000 

Prussia  .........................    800,000  400,000 

Austria  .........................    312,000  200,000 

Sweden  .........................    226,676  148,292 

Russia  .........................    408,000  350,000 

Spain  ........................      75,000  50,000 

Italy  ........................      30,000  20,000 

Switzerland  .....................      15,000  10,000 

Zoll  vereiri  ....................    250,000  200,000 

United  States  ..                        ..1,175.900  882,000 


Total 9,322,047  7,205,026 


301 

Thus  it  appears  that  with  a  production  of  less  than  ten 
million  tons  for  the  world's  supply  no  other  country  than 
ours  is  in  a  position  to  make  a  large  and  immediate  addi 
tion  to  its  annual  production.  The  difficulties  in  the  way 
may  be  briefly  stated  thus  :  Sweden  possesses  exhaustless 
supplies  of  the  richest  primitive  ores,  but  she  has  no  coal, 
and  her  annual  production  of  charcoal-iron  is  believed  to 
have  reached  its  limit.  Her  function  will  henceforth  be  to 
mine  and  export  ore.  Kussia  has  ample  supplies  of  ore, 
but  so  far  as  exploration  has  yet  discovered  is  deficient  in 
coal.  She  can,  however,  for  some  time  somewhat  aug 
ment  her  production  of  charcoal-iron.  Austria,  Italy, 
Spain,  and  the  States  of  the  Zollverein  have  ore,  but  little  or 
no  coal  available  for  iron  making,  and  are  unable  to  ex 
tend,  if  they  can  maintain,  their  present  production  of 
charcoal-iron.  France  has  neither  coal  nor  ore  sufficient 
to  supply  her  wants;  England  furnishes  her  with  one 
third  the  coal  she  now  consumes  'in  the  manufacture  of 
iron.  Little  Belgium  has  both  coal  and  ore,  and  they  are 
advantageously  situated,  but  the  field  is  so  contracted  that 
she  cannot  increase  her  production  beyond  her  own  wants, 
and  Prussia  is  a  large  importer  of  coal  and  pig-iron  from 
England.  So  much  for  the  prospective  increase  of  sup 
plies  ;  while,  as  illustrative  of  the  growing  demand,  I  need 
only  allude  to  the  gigantic  systems  of  railroads  building 
in  America,  Kussia,  and  India,  the  latter  at  immense  cost 
by  England,  in  the  hope  of  impairing  our  supremacy  as 
producers  of  cotton.* 

Had  we  continued  to  rely  upon  England  for  pig-iron  in 
excess  of  our  capacity  to  produce  it  at  the  time  of  fixing 
nine  dollars  as  the  duty,  and  also  to  draw  our  supplies  of  bar 
iron,  cast-steel,  and  Bessemer  rails  from  her,  the  extension 
of  our  railroad  system  must  have  been  checked  and  the 
per  capita  consumption  of  iron  in  this  country  been  much 
restricted.  For  nine  years  before  the  imposition  of  that 
duty  our  annual  production  had  been  less  than  800,000 
tons,  and  that  of  England  had  not  increased  at  the  rate  of 
100,000  tons  per  annum.  Our  demand  increases  at  the 
rate  of  from  170,000  to  200,000  tons  per  annum.  Whence 
but  from  our  own  ore  beds  and  coal  mines  could  the  sup- 

*  There  were  in  operation  in  the  United  States  on  the  1st  of  January,  1871, 
53,399  miles  of  railroad,  4999  miles  of  which  were  completed  during  1869,  and 
6199  during  1870.  Could  England  have  furnished  the  iron  required  for  thia 
extension  ? 


302  MR.  WELLS'  REPORT. 

ply  have  been  drawn?  The  production  of  pig-iron  in 
England  and  the  United  States  from  1854  to  1862  inclusive, 
was  as  follows : 

England.  United  State*. 

1854 3,069,838  716,674 

1855 3,218,154  754,178 

1856 3,586,377  874.428 

1857 3,659,447  798,157 

1858 3,456,064  705,094 

1859 3,712,904  840.427 

1860 3,826,752  913,774 

1861 3,712,390  731,564 

1862 3,943,469  787,662 

These  figures  show  that  the  two  great  iron-producing 
countries  of  the  world,  England  and  the  United  States,  in 
creased  their  joint  production  less  than  one  hundred 
thousand  tons  per  annum  for  nine  consecutive  years,  while 
we  alone  demand  an  increase  of  at  least  one  hundred  and 
seventy  thousand  tons,  and  prove  the  assertion  that  but  for 
the  application  of  an  incentive  to  the  production  of  iron 
in  this  country  the  expansion  of  our  railroad  system  and 
our  general  material  progress  must  have  been  impossible. 
Was  there  any  charm  by  which  an  increased  supply  could 
be  evoked  ?  Was  there  any  means  by  which  the  disparity 
between  the  wages  of  English  laborers  in  iron  works  and 
such  as  were  essential  to  the  support  of  American  citizens 
who  might  engage  in  the  production  of  iron  could  be 
counterbalanced  ?  Yes,  Mr.  Chairman,  there  was  one,  and 
that  was  applied.  It  was  to  impose  such  a  duty  as  would 
give  capitalists  and  men  of  enterprise  a  guarantee  that  if 
they  paid  workmen  fair  American  wages  for  building  fur 
naces,  digging  and  hauling  coal,  ore,  and  limestone,  and 
converting  them  into  pig-iron  they  should  not  be  under 
sold  in  our  own  markets  by  the  productions  of  underpaid 
British  workmen.  Nine  dollars  per  ton  it  was  believed 
would  give  them  that  guarantee,  and  yet  leave  our  mar 
kets  so  largely  open  to  English  competition  that  we  should 
derive  more  duty  from  pig-iron  than  we  had  done  under 
lower  duties. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  difference  between  the  wages  of 
English  and  American  workmen.  Let  me  show  how 
great  it  is.  The  English  shilling  is  twenty-five  cents  of 
our  money.  Commercial  men  know  this ;  there  are,  how 
ever,  many  of  our  people  not  familiar  with  the  details  of 
commerce  and  the  exchangeable  value  of  money  to  whom 


MB.  WELLS'  REPOKT.  303 

it  may  be  proper  to  state  the  fact.  Turning  again  to  the 
report  of  Mr.  Hewitt,  which  I  recur  to  frequently  and 
always  with  a  renewed  sense  of  obligation,  I  find  the  rates 
of  wages  paid  in  England  in  1866  to  have  been  as  fol 
lows  : 

WAGES  PAID  IN  SOUTH  STAFFORDSHIRE,  ENGLAND,  IN  1866. 

Per  Day. 

Common  laborers 2s.  6d.to     3s.    Qd. 

Puddlers 7  6  to     7     10 

Puddlers' helpers 2  6  to     2     11 

Puddle  rollers 9  0  

Heaters 7  0  

Heater  helpers 3  6  

Finishing  rollers 11  0  

Shinglers 9  0  to  15      0 

Machinists 4  0  to  36      0 

Blacksmiths 4  0  to    5      0 

Masons 7  6  to    8       6 

The  average  price  of  skilled  and  unskilled  labor  at  the  iron  works 
in  England  does  not  exceed  4s.  a  day. 

At  the  coal  and  iron  works  of  Creed  &  Williams,  in  Belgium,  the 
wages  paid  in  1866  were  as  follows  : 

Per  Day. 

Common  laborers Is.  2cZ,  to  3s.    6d. 

Loaders  of  coal 2     6     to  2     11 

Wood-cutters 2     6     to  2     11 

Wood  or  tree-setters 3    1    to  5      0 

Miners 211    to  4      2 

Exceptional  men ....5    0    to  6      0 

AT  THE  BLAST  FURNACES. 

Fillers ,.1  1  to  2  1 

Box  fillers 1  4  to  1  8 

Common  laborers 1  5  to  1  8 

Furnace-keepers 2  1  to  2  11 

IN    THE    ROLLING-MlLL. 

Puddlers 4    2  to  5  0 

Helpers 2     3  to  3  1 

Rollers 4    2  to  5  10 

Helpers 3    4  to  4  2 

Shearers 110  to  2  6 

Common  laborers 1    5  to  2  1 

In  all  other  European  countries  wages  are  lower  than  in  Eng 
land. 

»t 

These  figures  are  worthy  of  the  study  of  the  working 
men  of  this  country,  whom  Mr.  Commissioner  Wells  is 


304  MB.  WELLS'  REPORT. 

striving  to  array  in  hostility  against  those  whose  interests 
are  identical  with  their  own — the  men  who  have  embarked 
their  capital  in  an  attempt  to  make  the  United  States  com 
mercially  and  politically  independent  of  Great  Britain, 
and  who,  if  sustained  in  good  faith,  will  not  only  accom 
plish  this,  but  enable  us  to  meet  her  in  the  markets  of  the 
world  with  pig,  bar,  and  sheet-iron,  with  steel  in  all  its 
forms,  including  cutlery,  and  with  iron  ships  carrying  a 
commerce  as  extended  as  her  own  upon  every  sea. 

Having  shown  that  the  experiment  of  nine  dollars  per 
ton  has  been  successful  as  a  revenue  measure,  now  let  us 
see  what  effect  it  has  had  in  stimulating  production.  When 
it  was  adopted  English  iron-masters  saw  that  with  our  in 
exhaustible  fields  and  rich  varieties  of  coal  and  ore  we 
must  soon  become  competitors  with  them  for  our  home 
market,  and  at  no  distant  day  a  formidable  rival  in  the 
general  markets  of  this  continent.  This  it  was  their  in 
terest  to  prevent  if  possible,  and  though  their  increase  of 
production  had  been  less  than  100,000  tons  per  annum  for 
the  preceding  nine  years,  they  added  500,000  tons  the  next 
year,  and  in  1865  produced  nearly  900,000  tons  more  than 
they  had  ever  done  before.  I  have  shown  the  production 
of  the  two  countrievS  from  1854  to  1862.  The  Morrill 
tariff,  which  raised  the  duty  to  $6,  went  into  effect  in  1861. 
In  1864  the  duty  was  raised  to  $9.  The  results  have  been 
as  follows : 

England.  United  States. 

1863 4,510,040  947,604 

1864 4,767.951  1,135,497 

1865 4,819.254  931.582 

1866 4,523,897  1.350,943 

1867 4,761,028  1,461,626 

1868 1,603,000 

1869 1,900,000 

I  regret  my  inability  to  ascertain  the  English  produc 
tion  for  1868  and  1869;  but  in  view  of  the  average  of  the 
five  years  quoted,  and  the  fact  that  the  production  of  1865 
exceeds  so  largely  the  years  that  succeeded  as  well  as  those 
that  preceded  it,  it  is  fair  to  assume  that  it  has  not  been 
in  excess  of  that  year  in  either  of  these.  These  figures 
confirm  the  impression  that  England  has  attained  her 
maximum  production ;  for  while  her  increase  since  1863 
has  been  scarcely  appreciable,  ours  has  been  about  one 
hundred  and  ten  per  cent.  In  view  of  all  these  facts,  1 


MR.    WELLS1    REPORT.  305 

think  that  it  appears  again  in  the  matter  of  pig-iron,  as  it 
did  in  that  of  cast-steel  and  Bessemer  rails,  that  a  protec 
tive  duty  has  not  been,  as  Mr.  Wells  asserts,  a  tax  on,  but 
is  a  boon  to  the  American  consumer. 

COAL  AND  THE  BRITISH   NORTH  AMERICAN  COLONIES. 

I  have  said  that  the  report  is  devoted  to  the  promotion 
of  the  interests  of  England  and  her  North  American  colo 
nies,  and  have,  I  think,  shown  that  if  its  suggestions 
were  carried  into  effect  it  would  arrest  the  rapid  increase 
we  are  making  in  the  production  of  iron  and  steel,  and 
remand  us  to  commercial  and  political  dependence  on  our 
haughty  and  faithless  rival.  I  propose  now  to  illustrate 
Mr.  Wells'  palpable  desire  to  promote  the  interests  of 
England's  North  American  colonies — the  new  dominion, 
that  asylum  of  our  foes  in  war  and  base  of  illicit  opera 
tions  against  our  revenue  system  in  peace. 

The  sea-board  provinces,  whether  on  the  Atlantic  or 
Pacific  ocean,  are  suffering  discontent  that  is  rapidly  be 
coming  chronic.  From  1854  to  1866  the  colonists  were 
more  than  contented,  they  were  proud  and  joyous,  and 
immigrants  flowed  in  and  settled  among  them.  They  con 
trasted  their  condition  with  ours,  and  plumed  themselves 
upon  their  superior  prosperity.  Their  clip  of  wool  and 
crops  of  cereals  increased  annually,  their  fisheries  were  in 
creasingly  profitable,  and  their  coal  mines  yielded  unpar 
alleled  profits — in  one  year  one  Nova  Scotia  coal  company 
having  paid  its  stockholders  the  almost  fabulous  profit  of 
one  hundred  and  seventy-five  per  cent.  They  were  more 
than  hopeful  of  the  future ;  they  were  confident  and  arro 
gant.  With  them  the  southern  confederacy  was  a  fore 
gone  conclusion,  and  with  it  as  an  ally,  and  England  as 
their  sponsor,  they  saw  the  near  approach  of  the  day  when 
this  new  triple  alliance  should  hold  the  Yankee  States  as 
in  a  vice,  and  crush  or  strangle  them  at  pleasure.  This 
was  in  1864.  Their  tone  is  less  joyous  now.  Indeed,  it 
is  sad  unto  wailing.  Listen  to  one  of  them,  a  Nova  Sco- 
tian,  as  he  pours  the  story  of  their  wrongs  and  sufferings 
through  the  columns  of  Lippincott's  Magazine  for  July 
last: 

"  But  the  petition  of  three  hundred  thousand  good  subjects  was 

treated  with  indifference,  and  even  an  inquiry  into  their  grievances 

was  refused.     Then  it  was,  in  the  bitter  sorrow  and  indignation  that 

filled  us  at  that  time,  that  we  turned  our  eyes  to  the  great  nation 

20 


300  MR.  WELLS'  REPORT. 

beside  us  for  assistance.  But  even  there  no  help  was  to  be  had. 
The  reciprocity  treaty  had  been  abrogated  in  return  for  the  sympa 
thy  and  assistance  which  Canada  had  given  to  the  South  ;  and  the 
only  thing  which  could  support  our  commerce  and  encourage  our 
industries  under  the  heavier  duties  of  Canada  was  thus  denied  us, 
and  continues  to  be  denied  us.*  At  the  present  moment  we  are 
in  a  sad  case.  The  duties  and  taxes  of  the  Canadian  administration 
bear  heavily  upon  us  ;  our  commerce  is  languishing,  our  industries 
are  all  but  paralyzed.  The  markets  which  nature  intended  for  us, 
and  which  commerce  had  marked  out  for  her  own,  are  closed  to  us, 
and  in  consequence  we  finh  less,  mine  less,  manufacture  less,  export 
less.  Our  political  position  is  as  bad  as  perplexing.  We  will  not 
continue  in  our  present  union  with  Canada  if  we  can  help  it.  Wo 
have  laid  our  grievances  before  England.  England  refers  us  to 
Canada;  Canada  refers  us  to  England.  England  trusts  to  our  loy 
alty,  Canada  to  our  cupidity  or  our  fear,  to  keep, us  in  the  union.  If 
even  we  succeed  in  getting  repeal  we  cannot  stand  alone  without  a 
treaty  with  the  United  States.  If  that  is  denied  us — and  who  can 
doubt  it  f — we  must  even  seek  our  own  good  in  transferring  our  al 
legiance." 

This  is  a  faithful  portraiture  of  the  condition  of  the 
British  provinces  on  the  Atlantic  coast ;  and  that  of  British 
Columbia  on  the  Pacific  and  Puget  Sound  is  quite  as  hope 
less.  It  was  once  the  base  of  an  extended  system  of  smug 
gling  over  our  borders,  but  the  provincial  Government, 
being  unable  to  support  itself  by  internal  taxes,  was  com 
pelled  to  raise  revenue  by  a  tariff  almost  as  heavy  as  our 
own,  though  there  are  no  manufactures  to  protect.  This 
destroyed  the  profitable  business  of  smuggling  across  our 
borders,  and  brought  Victoria,  the  city  which  it  had  been 
fondly  hoped  would  be  the  commercial  rival  of  San  Fran 
cisco,  to  absolute  despair.  It  is  a  deserted  city.  In  July 
last,  as  my  colleagues  on  the  Committee  of  Ways  and 
Means  can  attest,  more  than  half  the  buildings  within  its 
limits  were  tenantless  and  for  rent  or  sale,  and  at  high 
noon  its  streets  were  as  deserted  as  though  pestilence  had 
scourged  it. 

Let  me  pause,  Mr.  Speaker,  to  ask  what  has  wrought 
this  wondrous  change,  and  why  more  than  one  hundred 
thousand  of  the  people  of  the  provinces  during  the  last 
year  came  to  dwell  among  us  and  share  the  burdens  of  our 
great  war  debt  ?  These  results  are  the  legitimate  conse 
quences  of  wise  and  patriotic  legislation  by  Congress. 
Commissioner  Wells  understands  it  as  well  as  the  rest  of 
us.  He  knows  as  well  as  the  Nova  Scotian  I  have  just 

*  The  Reciprocity  Treaty  expired  March,  1866. 


ME.   WELLS1   REPORT.  307 

quoted  that  the  repeal  of  the  Reciprocity  Treaty  wrought 
the  ruin  of  the  provinces.  That  treaty,  which  was  forced 
upon  us  by  our  old  southern  masters,  was  designed  espe 
cially  to  promote  the  prosperity  of  the  British  North 
American  provinces  at  the  cost  of  the  northern  States  of 
the  Union.  It  was  specially  designed  by  the  planters  of  the 
South  as  a  blow  at  the  prosperity  of  the  farmers  and  stock 
breeders  of  the  northwest.  It  went  into  effect  in  June,  1854, 
and  expired,  or  I  may  properly  say  was  rescinded  by  Con 
gress,  in  March,  1866.  It  was  admirably  adapted  to 
accomplish  its  purpose,  and  the  period  of  its  duration  was 
that  of  the  greatest  growth  of  Britain's  power  along  our 
borders.  That  gentlemen  who  represent  the  grain-grow 
ing  States  may  not  suspect  rne  of  misstating  the  object  of 
the  reciprocity  movement,  I  beg  leave  to  again  invite  their 
attention  to  a  few  words  from  pages  95  and  96  of  that 
remarkable  book,  "  Cotton  is  King,"  the  politico-economi 
cal  text-book  of  the  authors  of  the  late  rebellion  : 

"This  is  the  present  aspect  (1858)  of  the  provision  question  as  it 
regards  slavery  extension.  Prices  are  approximating  the  maximum 
point  beyond  which  our  provisions  cannot  be  fed  to  slaves  unless 
there  is  a  corresponding  increase  in  the  price  of  cotton.  Such  a  re 
sult  was  not  anticipated  by  southern  statesmen  when  they  had  suc 
ceeded  in  overthrowing  the  protective  policy,  destroying  the  United 
States  Bank,  and  establishing  the  sub-Treasury  system. 

"And  why  has  this  occurred  ?  The  mines  of  California  prevented 
both  the  free-trade  tariff  and  the  sub-Treasury  scheme  from  exhaust 
ing  the  country  of  the  precious  metals,  extinguishing  the  circulation 
of  bank  notes,  and  reducing  the  prices  of  agricultural  products  to 
the  specie  value.  At  the  date  of  the  passage  of  the  Nebraska  bill 
the  multiplication  of  provisions  by  their  more  extended  cultivation 
was  the  only  measure  left  that  could  produce  a  reduction  of  prices, 
and  meet  the  wants  of  the  planters.  The  Canadian  Reciprocity 
Treaty,  since  secured,  will  bring  the  products  of  the  British  North 
American  colonies,  free  of  duty,  into  competition  with  those  of  the 
United  States  when  prices  with  us  rule  high,  and  tend  to  diminish 
their  cost." 

But  this  treaty  has  been  rescinded.  Why  refer  to  it? 
Does  the  Commissioner  propose  to  renew  it?  No,  sir; 
that  would  be  frank,  and  not  in  accordance  with  his  prac 
tice,  lie  moves  stealthily  toward  his  sinister  objects.  He 
is  a  protective  free-trader,  a  free-trade  protectionist,  a 
disciple  of  Henry  Clay,  but  an  advocate  of  the  free-trade 
dogmas  of  John  C.  Calhoun.  He  does  not  propose  a  renewal 
of  the  Reciprocity  Treaty;  but  asserting  that  all  customs 
duties  are  taxes,  and  increase  the  price  of  the  article  on  which 


308 

they  are  levied,  he  demands  cheap  fuel,  food,  and  beer,  and 
proposes  to  secure  these  desirable  objects  by  removing  all 
duties  from  articles  the  production  of  the  North  American 
provinces.  Nor  does  he  do  this  in  terms.  Taking  the  leading 
staples  of  the  provinces  separately,  he  submits  specious, 
but  false  reasons  for  the  removal  of  all  duties  from  each 
of  them.  He  would  give  the  people  of  the  provinces  the 
benefits  they  derived  from  the  Keciprocity  Treaty  without 
stipulating  for  any  of  the  few  benefits  it  brought  his  coun 
trymen.  To  adopt  his  recommendations  in  this  behalf 
would  be  to  pay  from  the  Treasury  of  the  United  States 
annually  to  the  colonists  from  six  million  to  ten  million 
dollars  as  a  consideration  for  their  continued  submission 
to  British  legislation  and  colonial  policy.  They  are  tend 
ing  toward  the  Union.  They  were  alien  enemies  during 
the  war,  but  millions  of  them  now  desire  to  be  friends  and 
fellow-countrymen,  and  the  way  to  promote  this  consum 
mation,  so  devoutly  to  be  wished,  is  to  let  them  know  that 
the  avenue  to  free  trade  with  us  is  through  annexation. 
This  accomplished,  they  would  share  our  prosperity  and 
our  responsibilities,  and  their  country  would  cease  to  be  a 
base  of  hostilities  as  it  now  is  in  peace  and  war. 

Let  me  not  be  suspected  of  misrepresenting  the  position 
of  Mr.  Wells.  The  principal  articles  the  provinces  export 
are  lumber,  wool,  coal,  barley,  and  the  other  cereals,  and 
from  these  he  would  remove  all  duties,  though  they  yielded 
during  the  year  which  ended  June  30, 1868,  $4,352,770  49 
in  gold,  or  about  six  millions  in  currency.  It  is  true  some 
of  the  wool  which  contributed  to  this  amount  came  from 
other  countries,  and  some  of  the  coal  from  England;  but 
in  order  to  restore  prosperity  to  the  trade  of  the  provinces, 
he  would  admit  their  staples  free,  even  though  other  coun 
tries  might  share  the  advantage. 

Though  very  urgent  that  the  duty  should  be  taken  off 
Canadian  barley,  he  makes  no  specific  recommendation  as 
to  the  removal  of  duties  from  the  other  cereals.  He 
merely  speaks  of  the  "extreme  emergency"  that  can 
"justify  a  tax  on  the  breadstuffs  and  food  of  a  nation." 
His  argument  in  favor  of  free  grain  and  .provisions  from 
the  provinces  is  enforced  in  this  wise : 

"  Coal  is  a  necessity  of  life  next  in  importance  to  food  ;  indeed,  aa 
both  are  in  our  climate  absolutely  indispensable,  it  cannot  be  said 
that  either  is  more  or  less  needful  than  the  other,  for  life  cannot  be 
sustained  without  both.  The  universally  recognized  principle  of 


MR,  WELLS'  REPORT.  309 

taxation  that  a  tax  should  be  taken  from  what  can  be  spared  forbids 
the  laying  of  a  tax  upon  that  which  is  indispensable  to  rich  and 
poor  alike." 

A  free  translation  of  all  which  is,  that  as  New  England 
has  no  coal,  and  cannot  raise  her  own  supply  of  grain  and 
provisions,  and  can  get  both  cheaper  from  the  British  colo 
nies  than  she  can  from  the  prairies  of  the  northwester  the 
coal-fields  of  Pennsylvania,  Maryland,  Virginia,  or  North 
Carolina,  it  is  a  crime  against  nature  and  the  British  Gov 
ernment  to  lay  duties  on  the  grain  and  provisions  of  the 
provinces. 

Leaving  the  question  of  the  propriety  of  retaining  duties 
on  grain,  live  stock,  and  provisions  to  the  consideration 
of  gentlemen  from  the  West,  I  propose  to  examine  what 
the  Commissioner  has  to  say  on  the  subject  of  coal.  But 
before  entering  more  fully  upon  this  subject,  let  me  apply 
to  grain  and  provisions  the  argument  he  makes  for  free 
provincial  coal,  associating  them  with  it  in  his  text,  that 
we  may  see  whether  his  argument  does  not  apply  to  them 
with  greater  force  in  proportion  as  Wisconsin,  Iowa,  Min 
nesota,  and  Kansas  are  more  remote  from  "  the  northeast 
ern  sea-board"  than  the  coal-fields  of  Virginia,  North 
Carolina,  Maryland,  and  Pennsylvania  : 

"  '  If  the  enhanced  price  paid  by  the  consumer  for  his  coal,'  wheat, 
corn,  or  provisions,  'in  consequence  of  the  existence  of  this  duty, 
were  all  paid  to  the  Pennsylvania  miner'  or  western  farmer,  '  it 
would  be,  of  course,  great  injustice ;  but  the  country  would  be  none 
the  poorer  because  the  law  took  money  from  one  man  and  gave  it  to 
another.  But  it  happens  that  while  the  consumer  pays  the  increase, 
the  immediate  producer  is  not  benefited,  inasmuch  as  the  whole 
enhanced  price  is  expended  in  paying  for  the  transportation  of  the 
coal,'  grain,  or  provision, '  to  a  greater  distance;  in  other  words,  the 
payment  is  for  unnecessary  transportation,  i.  e.,  useless  labor.  Now, 
no  acquisition  of  skill  can  change  this.  It  is  fixed  by  the  laws  of  na 
ture.  To  the  end  of  time  it  will  cost  more;  i.  e.,  it  will  take  more 
labor  to  bring  every  ton  of  coal,'  grain,  or  provisions  *  from  western 
Pennsylvania,'  Wisconsin,  Iowa,  Minnesota,  Missouri,  or  Kansas 
'  across  the  Alleghany  mountains  '  or  the  lakes  « to  the  northeastern 
sea-board  than  to  bring  it  from  Nova  Scotia.  So  long  as  a  duty 
makes  it  possible  to  bring  coal,'  grain,  or  provisions  '  from  the  for 
mer  source,  so  long  that  unnecessary  work  will  be  done ;  but  the 
price  does  not  represent  a  profit,  but  the  cost  of  useless  labor.'  " 

Is  not  this  argument  conclusive?  Does  it  not  prove 
that  her  Britannic  Majesty's  liege  subjects  of  the  new  Do 
minion  should  grow  our  grain  and  stock,  and  grind  our 
flour,  as  well  as  mine  our  coal  as  long  as  their  freedom 


310 

from  our  war  debt  will  enable  them  to  do  it  more  cheaply 
than  we  can  ?  If  this  be  not  the  conclusion  to  which  it 
leads,  I  hope  some  gentleman  from  a  grain-growing  or 
cattle-raising  district  will  show  us  why. 

Mr.  Wells  does  not  like  Pennsylvania,  and  throughout 
his  report  ignores  the  essential  facts  that  Virginia  and 
North  Carolina  have  tide-water  coal-fields  of  better  quality 
and  greater  extent  than  those  of  Nova  Scotia,  from  which 
New  England  can  be  more  cheaply  supplied  than  from  the 
provinces ;  and  that  Maryland  sends  more  bituminous  coal 
from  her  mountains  to  the  "northern  sea-board"  than 
Pennsylvania  does  or  ever  did.  In  this,  however,  he  is  as 
frank  and  truthful  as  in  other  respects.  I  do  not  wonder 
that  he  dislikes  the  people  of  Pennsylvania.  By  their 
persistent  energy,  as  the  letter  of  Thomas  Firth  &  Son 
shows,  they  have  so  increased  the  supply  and  reduced  the 
price  of  cast-steel  as  to  seriously  affect  the  profits  of  his 
Sheffield  clients ;  and  by  the  large  increase  they  are  mak 
ing  of  blast  furnaces  they  threaten  to  enter  the  markets  of 
the  world  at  an  early  day  against  all  England  with  pig- 
iron.  Nor  do  I  forget  that  it  was  Pennsylvania  Kepre- 
sentatives  and  economists  that  hastened  to  bring  to  the 
attention  of  the  country  the  equivocations,  duplicity,  and 
falsehoods  with  which  his  last  annual  report  abounded. 

Speaking  of  the  duty  on  coal,  he  says,  "  it  is  urged  as  a 
protective  measure,"  and  refers  to  it  as  a  "  tax  on  fuel." 
This  involves  but  two  misstatements  of  fact,  namely,  that 
the  duty  is  urged  or  levied  for  protection,  and  that  it  is  a 
tax  on  any  American  consumer  of  coal.  Neither  of  these 
allegations  is  true.  The  protectionists  of  the  country  do 
not  regard  the  question  of  the  duty  on  coal  as  a  politico- 
economical  question,  and  the  New  York  Tribune,  know 
ing  that  the  price  of  coal  would  not  be  affected  by  the 
abolition  of  the  duty,  advocates  its  repeal  as  a  means  of 
proving  the  absurdity  of  the  free  trade  argument.  They 
do  not  urge  it  as  a  protective,  but  as  a  revenue  measure, 
and,  in  view  of  the  present  condition  of  the  provinces,  as 
eminently  a  political  question.  As  a  political  question  it 
has  great  significance,  as  every  provincial  exporter  of  coal 
knows  experimentally  that  the  duty  is  not  paid  by  the 
American  consumer,  but  is  deducted  from  the  extraordi 
nary  profits  he  would  realize  if  the  duty  were  removed, 
find  which  he  did  realize  during  the  continuance  of  the 
Reciprocity  Treaty.  As  an  economical  or  protective  mea- 


MB.  WELLS'  REPORT.  311 

sure,  it  is  not  worth  consideration ;  as  a  revenue  measure, 
it  involves  the  receipt  by  the  Treasury  of  about  five 
hundred  thousand  dollars  gold  annually,  a  comparatively 
small  matter,  but  of  some  importance ;  but  it  is  as  a  political 
question  that  it  is  most  worthy  of  consideration.  As  Mr. 
Wells  and  the  free-trade  league  have  industriously  pro 
moted  a  general  misapprehension  of  this  subject,  I  pro 
pose,  as  I  have  said,  to  devote  a  few  minutes  to  its  eluci 
dation. 

I  propose  to  show,  first,  that  as  an  economical  question 
it  is  not  of  sufficient  importance  to  deserve  consideration. 
This  can  be  done  by  inviting  attention  to  the  relation  of 
the  total  amount  of  foreign  coal  imported  from  all  sources 
to  the  amount  consumed  in  the  northern  Atlantic  States 
alone.  Were  the  whole  amount  involved  it  would  not  be 
sufficient  to  affect  the  supply  or  price,  as  the  grand  total 
imported  from  all  countries  on  both  coasts  has  exceeded 
600,000  tons  in  but  three  years,  and  500,000  in  but  three 
others,  and  the  consumption  of  coal  east  of  the  Alleghany 
mountains  and  north  of  the  Potomac  will  be  about  20,- 
000,000  tons  this  year.  What  the  consumption  is  on  the 
Pacific,  where  coal  from  British  Columbia  was  until  within 
a  few  years  the  sole  dependence,  I  have  no  data  for  an  ac 
curate  estimate.  Whatever  the  amount  is  it  should  be 
deducted  from  the  total  in  estimating  the  percentage  of 
supply  derived  by  New  England  from  Nova  Scotia  and 
England;  the  residue,  whatever  it  may  be,  is  assuredly 
not  sufficient  to  affect  either  the  price  or  supply. 

But  the  question  does  not  relate  to  the  whole  of  this 
residue,  but  only  to  so  much  as  would  be  the  amount  im 
ported  if  the  duty  were  off  in  excess  of  that  brought  in 
under  duty.  As  English  coal  has  always  been  subject  to 
duty,  we  have  no  means  of  ascertaining  how  much  the  re 
peal  of  the  duty  might  increase  importation  from  that 
country  ;  but  as  her  scientific  men  have  admonished  her 
of  the  danger  of  exhausting  her  supplies  of  coal — and  even 
Mr.  Wells  agrees  with  recognized  authorities  in  believing 
that  her  production  has  reached  its  maximum — and  as  she 
has  more  advantageous  markets  nearer  home,  the  repeal 
of  the  duty  would  not  probably  affect  perceptibly  the  im 
portation  from  that  quarter. 

How  much  the  imposition  of  the  duty  on  provincial 
co:*l  has  affected  the  total  amount  imported  we  can  ascer 
tain,  but,  unfortunately,  the  Treasury  reports  do  not  ena- 


312  MR.  WELLS'  REPORT. 

• 

ble  us  to  distinguish  between  the  amount  imported  on 
either  coast.  The  Pacific  States,  as  I  have  said,  formerly 
depended  on  British  Columbia ;  but  since  the  opening  of 
the  mines  at  Mont  Diablo,  Seattle,  and  other  points  within 
our  territory,  the  quantity  of  provincial  coal  imported  is 
said  to  be  diminishing.  But  assuming  that  the  whole 
amount  received  on  both  coasts  carne  from  Nova  Scotia, 
and  was  consumed  in  New  England,  the  repeal  of  the 
treaty  and  imposition  of  the  duty  cannot  have  had  an  ap 
preciable  effect  on  the  price  or  supply  in  the  markets  of 
that  section,  as  will  appear  from  the  facts  I  am  about  to 
submit. 

The  amount  of  provincial  coal  imported  into  the  coun 
try,  on  both  coasts,  has  exceeded  400,000  tons  in  but  two 
years ;  and  the  largest  amount  imported  in  any  one  year 
was  465,194  tons,  which  was  in  1865.  With  one  other 
exception,  that  of  1866,  when  the  amount  reached  404,254 
tons,  the  total  import  on  both  coasts  never  reached  340,000. 
It  is  to  be  regretted  that  the  proportion  of  these  amounts 
that  went  into  California  and  Oregon  cannot  be  ascertained. 
Could  this  be  done  it  would  make  the  pretence  that  the 
duty  on  Nova  Scotia  coal  affects  either  the  price  or  supply 
of  coal  in  New  England  so  supremely  absurd  that  Mr. 
Wells  himself  would  abandon  it.  But  the  sum  in  contro 
versy  is  less  than  this;  it  is  the  difference  between  the 
average  amount  annually  imported  free  under  the  treaty 
and  the  amount  which  comes  to  our  markets  and  pays  a 
duty  of  $1  25  per  ton. 

The  duty,  as  I  have  said,  came  into  effect  on  the  expira 
tion  of  the  treaty  in  March,  1866,  so  that  the  year  in  which 
the  largest  amount  was  imported  was  that  immediately 
preceding  its  repeal.  I  propose  to  ascertain  the  amount 
about  which  this  wide-spread  controversy  has  been  raised, 
by  contrasting  the  average  importation  for  the  three  last 
years  of  free  coal  under  the  treaty,  including  that  which 
BO  far  exceeded  all  others,  with  the  three  years  immedi 
ately  succeeding  the  repeal  of  the  treaty,  during  which  it 
paid  $1  25  duty.  During  the  last  three  years  in  which  it 
was  free  from  duty  the  average  annual  importation  was 
355,490  tons,  and  during  the  three  succeeding  years  in 
which  it  paid  duty  the  average  annual  importation  has 
been  326,626,  showing  an  annual  difference  of  but  31,864 
tons.  Surely  no  man  with  less  effrontery  than  Mr.  Wells 
will  say  that  the  deduction  of  31,864  tons  from  one  of 


MR.  WELLS'  REPORT.  313 

many  sources  from  which  a  supply  ranging  at  about  20,- 
000,000  tons  are  derived  can  have  affected  either  the  sup 
ply  or  price  of  the  commodity.  But  if  we  assume  that 
one-third  of  the  importation  of  provincial  coal  is  upon  the 
Pacific  coast — which,  I  think,  we  may  safely  do — we  will 
see  how  utterly  inappreciable  must  be  the  effect  of  the 
maintenance  or  repeal  of  the  duty  on  provincial  coal. 

Thus,  Mr.  Chairman,  it  must  become  apparent  that  the 
maintenance  of  the  duty  is  not,  as  Mr.  Wells  asserts, 
"  urged  as  a  protective  measure."  Surely  those  who  have 
the  machinery  to  bring  20,000,000  tons  to  market  annually 
need  not  shrink  from  the  effect  of  a  cause  which  increases 
or  diminishes  the  total  amount  twenty  or  thirty  thousand 
tons  per  annum. 

I  propose  next  to  show  the  falsity  of  Mr.  Wells'  other 
proposition,  namely,  that  this  duty  is  a  tax  on  the  con 
sumer.  Happily,  this  is  susceptible  of  demonstration. 
The  Pictou  coal  is  of  a  lower  grade,  and  consequently  of 
less  value  than  the  Cumberland  coal  of  Maryland,  or  the 
tide-water  coal  of  Virginia.  Its  price  is  always  lower 
than  these  in  any  market.  The  average  price  of  Nova 
Scotia  coal  by  cargo  at  Boston  per  ton  of  2240  pounds  du 
ring  1861,  the  first  year  of  the  war,  as  shown  by  weekly 
quotations  in  the  Boston  shipping-list  and  price-current, 
was  $4  67.  It  was  then  duty  free,  and  so  continued  for 
more  than  five  years.  The  war  did  not  inflict  greenbacks 
and  an  inflated  currency  upon  the  coal  operators  of  Nova 
Scotia.  It  did  not  create  an  enormous  system  of  internal 
taxation  to  oppress  them.  Their  laborers  were  not  tempted 
by  patriotism  or  offers  of  bounty,  or  taken  by  draft  to  the 
battle-field  to  bleed  and  die  for  their  country,  as  were  those 
of  the  American  operator.  Nor  did  all  these  causes  com 
bine  to  make  an  increase  of  wages  necessary  to  the  sup 
port  of  the  laborer  and  his  family.  No,  sir ;  their  wages 
remained  as  before,  or  were  reduced  by  the  fact  that  thou 
sands  of  able-bodied  sympathizers  with  the  rebellion  sought 
safety  and  employment  in  the  provinces ;  and  British  emi 
gration,  that  but  for  the  war  would  have  come  to  us,  flowed 
in  upon  them.  Our  immigration,  which  for  the  six  years 
preceding  the  war  had  exceeded  an  average  of  140,000, 
fell  off  to  less  than  92,000  in  each  of  the  years  1861  and 
1862,  although  the  emigration  from  Liverpool  to  America 
was  not  diminished  during  these  years;  while  therefore 
we  suffered  for  the  want  of  labor,  it  was  from  these  causes 


314  MR.  WELLS'  REPORT. 

for  a  time  redundant  in  the  provinces.  All  the  conditions 
were  such  as  to  enable  the  provincial  operators  to  produce 
and  sell  coal  cheaper  during  the  war  than  they  had  done 
before.  But  was  the  price  in  Boston  regulated  by  its 
cost  ?  No,  prices  never  are ;  it  depended  on  our  necessi 
ties,  and  followed  the  price  of  American  coal.  Thus  the 
average  price  in  1862,  as  shown  by  the  authority  I  have 
already  quoted,  was  $560;  in  1868,  $740;  in  1864, 
$1040;  1865,  $9  60.  In  March  of  the  next  year  the 
treaty  expired,  and  it  became  subject  to  duty,  and,  accord 
ing  to  Mr.  Wells'  theory,  must  have  gone  up  $1  25,  or  to 
$10  85  per  ton.  But  in  this  case  his  theory  is  in  conflict 
with  the  facts,  as  it  is  so  frequently,  for  in  that  year  coal 
sold,  duty  paid,  at  $8  54,  netting  the  exporter  and  foreign 
carrier  but  $7  29,  and  in  1869  it  gave  them  forty-four  cents 
less,  having  averaged  but  $8  10 ;  and  in  1868  it  averaged 
$8  16,  so  that  in  each  and  every  year  it  bore  the  same  re 
lation  to  Cumberland  coal  that  it  has  always  borne  since 
the  latter  was  introduced  to  the  New  England  market 
about  twenty  years  ago,  and  sold  at  about  a  dollar  a  ton 
lower. 

These  facts,  in  my  judgment,  prove  two  things ;  one  of 
which  is  that  the  Acadian  coal  operators  do  not  send  us 
coal  as  a  benevolent,  but  as  a  commercial  operation,  out 
of  which  they  make  all  they  can  at  the  prices  current  in 
our  market;  and  the  other  is,  that  they  can  afford  to  pay 
the  duty  and  make  a  living  profit  by  selling  us  the  very 
limited  amount  they  can  mine  at  the  rates  current  in  our 
markets.  In  this  they  obey  the  law  which  is  now  teach 
ing  our  western  producers  of  grain,  by  a  painful  experi 
ence,  the  importance  of  a  home  market ;  that  law,  and  it 
is  universal  in  its  application,  is,  that  he  who  has  to  carry 
his  commodities  to  a  distant  market  must  pay  all  the 
charges  thereon,  while  he  whose  goods  are  sought  by  cus 
tomers  fixes  his  own  prices  and  makes  the  purchaser  pay 
all  charges. 

It  thus  becomes  apparent  that  the  repeal  of  the  duty 
on  coal  would  not  reduce  the  price  of  that  article  in  New- 
England  one  cent,  per  ton  or  increase  the  amount  brought 
to  market  appreciably  ;  its  only  effect  would  be  to  take 
from  the  Treasury  an  average  of  from  four  to  five  hun 
dred  thousand  dollars  in  gold  annually  and  give  it  to  the 
colonists  as  a  reward  for  remaining  contented  subjects  of 
her  Britannic  Majesty ;  a  proposition  at  which  rny  pa- 


MR.  WELLS'  REPORT.  315 

triotism  revolts,  though  it  be  ever  so  earnestly  recom 
mended  by  Mr.  Commissioner  Wells. 

HOW   THE   SOUTH   SHOULD   DIVERSIFY   ITS  INDUSTRY. 

I  think  I  have  sufficiently  disclosed  the  devotion  of 
our  Special  Commissioner  of  Revenue  to  the  interests  of 
England;  but  I  cannot  refrain  from  inviting  the  attention 
of  gentlemen  from  the  South  to  the  treacherous  sugges 
tions  he  offers  them  on  the  subject  of  the  proper  means 
of  diversifying  their  industry.  On  this  subject  he  says : 

"  The  large  amount  of  capital  thus  becoming  annually  available 
at  the  South  will  undoubtedly  seek  in  great  part  investment  in 
domestic  and  local  enterprises  and  speedily  lead  to  the  establish 
ment  of  manufactures  on  an  extensive  scale.  The  true  diversity 
of  employment  which  results  from  freedom  has  now,  therefore,  be 
come  to  the  South  for  the  first  time  possible  ;  and  southern  capital 
can  soon  be  advantageously  applied  to  the  manufacture  of  agricul 
tural  tools  and  implements,  leather,  wagons,  wooden-ware,  soap, 
starch,  clothing,  and  similar  articles.  These  are  manufactures  in 
which  iron,  steel  and  cloth  are  raw  materials.  They  employ  the 
largest  amount  of  labor  in  proportion  to  product  and  capital,  and 
warrant  the  payment  of  high  wages.  On  the  other  hand,  what  are 
commonly  called  manufactures,  namely,  iron  and  steel,  and  cotton 
and  woolen  cloth,  are  examples  of  concentration.  They  require 
large  capital,  employ  but  few  hands,  and  would  naturally  come  much 
later.*  We  already  have  in  the  United  States  an  excess  of  cotton 
and  woolen  spindles,  and  to  invest  capital  in  more  would  be  simply 
a  waste  when  there  are  vast  needs  at  the  South  requiring  far  less 
capital,  and  warranting  much  greater  compensation  for  labor  than 
can  be  paid  in  textile  fabrics." 

Most  of  the  southern  States  abound  in  coal,  varieties 
of  iron  ore  of  very  high  quality,  limestone,  and  water- 
power.  Inaccessible  as  their  interior  districts  are  from 
the  sea-board,  freight  adds  heavily  to  the  cost  of  iron 
purchased  either  from  the  Atlantic  States  or  England. 
They  need  preeminently  among  the  States  of  the  Union 
an  extension  of  railroads  and  the  establishment  of  found- 
eries,  rolling-mills,  locomotive  works,  and  machine-shops. 
The  primary  prerequisite  to  the  ample  development  of 
the  great  resources  of  the  southern  States  is  an  adequate 
supply  of  cheap  iron  and  the  means  of  shaping  it  for  use. 


*  The  people  of  Virginia,  Tennessee  and  Georgia  have  wisely  shown  their 
contempt  for  Mr.  Wells'  suggestion  that  they  should  postpone  efforts  to  make 
iron.  Staunton,  Atlanta  and  Chattanooga  have  already  become  celebrated  for 
the  quality  and  quantity  of  iron  they  produce,  and  the  work  done  by  their  roll 
ing-mills.  This  may  be  bad  for  Mr.  Wells'  English  friends,  but  it  U  certainly 
well  for  us. 


316  MR.  WELLS'  REPORT. 

They  have  few  skilled  laborers,  and  the  manufacture  of 
pig-iron  and  the  rolling  of  rails  require  but  comparatively 
few  skilled  men.  The  digging  and  hauling  of  coal,  ore, 
and  limestone  require  no  special  preparation.  It  is  work 
for  the  unskilled  laborer  at  which  freedmen  can  succeed, 
and  they  are  therefore  in  a  condition  to  engage  in  the 
production  of  this  article  of  primary  importance,  though 
they  may  not  have  the  trained  artisans  for  the  introduc- 
t:on  of  simpler  branches  of  mechanics. 

The  cotton  growing  portion  of  the  United  States  is  the 
proper  locality  for  cotton  factories.  The  South  can  spin 
yarn  and  produce  unbleached  fabrics  at  from  fifteen  to 
twenty  per  cent,  less  than  the  same  work  can  be  done  in 
New  England,  and  cheaper  even  than  it  can  be  done  by 
the  underpaid  laborers  of  Great  Britain.  Will  gentlemen 
from  the  South  consider  that  what  the  picking-room  is  to 
the  English  or  northern  factory  the  gin-room  is  to  the 
factory  near  the  cotton-field,  and  that  all  charges  incurred 
between  the  two  would  be  saved  by  the  southern  manu 
facturer  ?  Before  cotton  reaches  either  New  or  Old  Eng 
land  it  must  be  pressed  and  baled  and  hooped  and  marked 
and  transported,  losing  interest  and  paying  freight  and 
commission  at  each  stage  of  the  transportation;  and 
when  it  has  arrived  at  the  threshold  of  the  distant  factory 
it  must  be  freed  from  its  hoops,  stripped  of  its  bagging, 
and  put  through  the  processes  of  the  picking-room  to 
restore  it  with  as  little  damage  as  possible  to  the  condi 
tion  in  which  it  was  when  it  left  the  gin.  From  all  these 
charges  the  manufacturer  in  the  cotton  district  is  free ; 
and  together  they  amount  to  what  would  be  a  fair  profit, 
which  in  connection  with  the  improved  quality  that 
would  result  from  the  use  of  the  unbroken  fiber  he  would 
use  would  enable  him  to  spin  yarns  for  all  the  northern 
States  and  England  too. 

But  this  would  hurt  the  English  cotton-spinner;  this 
would  advance  the  interests  of  the  United  States  to  the 
detriment  of  England,  as  would  the  establishment  in  the 
midst  of  the  coal  and  iron  fields  of  Virginia,  Tennessee, 
Arkansas,  Alabama,  and  Georgia  of  furnaces,  founderies, 
rolling-mills,  and  steel-works.  Fortunately,  the  people 
of  the  South  are  deeply  impressed  with  the  importance 
of  the  early  introduction  of  these  branches  of  manufac 
tures;  and  among  the  sixty-five  furnaces  erected  during 
the  last  year  four  are  in  Virginia,  six  in  Missouri,  three 


MR.  WELLS'  REPORT.  317 

in  Kentucky,  one  in  Georgia,  two  in  Alabama,  and  one 
in  Tennessee.  It  is  not,  therefore,  probable  that  very 
general  heed  will  be  given  by  the  people  of  the  South  to 
the  advice  offered  by  Mr.  Wells,  or  lhat  they  will  abandon 
the  hope  of  exporting  their  cotton  in  yarn  and  fabrics, 
the  manufacture  of  which  will  give  employment  to  and 
improve  the  condition  of  their  now  unemployed  men, 
women,  and  children,  or  will  forego  the  privilege  of  an 
adequate  supply  of  good  and  cheap  iron  manufactured  in 
their  midst,  in  order  to  turn  their  attention  to  making 
"wooden-ware,  soap,  starch,  clothing  and  similar  articles." 
They  will  not,  I  apprehend,  be  willing  to  forego  their 
greatest  source  of  profit  in  order  to  oblige  him  by  per 
mitting  England  still  to  retain  her  supremacy  as  the  cot 
ton-spinner  and  principal  iron  manufacturer  of  the"  world. 

WHAT  TAXES   SHOULD  BE   REPEALED. 

Mr.  Chairman,  permit  me  to  repeat  the  fact  that  duties 
which  serve  to  develop  the  resources  of  a  country  and 
cheapen  commodities,  by  inducing  home  competition,  the 
diversification  of  labor  and  the  opening  of  new  sources 
of  employment,  and  increase  the  general  stock  produced, 
are  not  taxes  even  though  they  fail  to  reduce  immediately 
the  price  of  the  commodity  on  which  they  are  imposed, 
as  adequate  duties  on  cast-steel  and  Bessemer  rails  have 
done.  They  are  during  the  interim  the  price  paid  for 
establishing  the  commercial  and  political  independence 
of  the  country ;  or  may  rather  be  regarded  as  a  tempo 
rary  advance  to  be  reimbursed  in  the  near  future  by  pro 
ducing  a  sense  of  national  security,  a  wider  field  of  pro 
fitable  employment  for  the  people  at  large,  and  an  adequate 
and  cheaper  supply  of  better  goods  through  the  long 
future.*  But  such  is  not  the  case  with  all  duties.  There 
are  duties  that  are  taxes  and  must  remain  so  forever,  or 
into  that  far  future  whose  possibilities  we  cannot  foresee. 
Such  are  duties  imposed  on  commodities  which  we  do  not 

*  The  proposition  is,  or  may  be,  to  raise  the  price  of  a  manufactured  article 
for  a  time,  in  the  expectation  that  advances  in  skill  and  machinery,  and  a  more 
secure  place  in  the  market — where  conspiracies  abroad  cannot  break  in  to  crush 
out  the  capital  invested — will  by  and  by,  or  perhaps  in  a  very  short  time,  afford 
us  the  same  articles  at  prices  greatly  reduced.  Even  Adam  Smith  saw  this ; 
conceding  that  "  a  particular  manufacture  may  sometimes  be  acquired  sooner 
than  it  could  have  been  otherwise,  and  after  a  certain  time  may  be  made  at 
home  as  cheap,  or  cheaper  than  in  the  foreign  country."  ("  Wealth  of  Nations," 
Vol.  i.  p.  448J  And  what  have  we  ourselves  discovered,  in  hundreds  of  ina 


318 

and  cannot  produce,  but  which  enter  into  the  daily  life  of 
the  people,  either  directly  as  food,  or  as  the  raw  material 
of  articles  we  are  producing  in  competition  with  countries 
whose  laborers  receive  not  a  moiety  of  the  wages  paid 
for  the  same  work  in  this  country,  and  which  are  neces 
sary  for  the  support  of  a  family  whose  children  are  to  be 
educated  for  future  citizenship.  We  raise  no  tea  or 
coffee,  and  the  duty  of  twenty-five  cents  a  pound  on  tea, 
which  is  at  the  rate  of  seventy-eight  and  a  half  per  cent, 
on  the  cost  of  our  whole  importation  for  1868,  and  of 
five  cents  a  pound  on  coffee,  or  at  the  rate  of  forty-seven 
and  a  half  per  cent,  on  the  importation  of  1868,  are  taxes 
— purely  and  simply  taxes.  Yet  the  Commissioner  does 
not  propose  to  repeal  or  abate  these,  and  why  should  he  ? 
Neither  England  nor  her  North  American  colonies  pro 
duce  tea  or  coffee.  Not  only  does  he  not  propose  to  repeal 
these  taxes  now,  but  in  his  ''schedule  of  a  tariff  construct 
ed  with  a  view  of  obtaining  from  the  smallest  number  of 
imported  articles  an  annual  revenue  of  $150,000,000  "  he 
retains  them  both  and  proposes  to  raise  $22,000,000  a 
year  from  them,  namely,  $12,000,000  from  coffee  and 
$10,000,000  from  tea.  We  now  impose  a  duty  of  fifteen 
cents  a  pound  on  pepper.  As  we  grow  no  pepper,  this  is 
a  tax — a  tax  at  the  rate  of  two  hundred  and  ninety-seven 
per  cent,  on  the  entire  importation  for  1868,  and  which 
extracted  from  the  people  in  that  year  $792,490  45.  The 
like  duty  on  allspice  is  a  tax.  It  is  at  the  rate  of  three 
hundred  and  seventy-six  and  a  half  per  cent.,  and  drew 
from  the  people  in  1868  $142,981  50.  These  duties  and 
many  scores  of  such  that  I  could  indicate  are  all  taxes, 
as  they  stimulate  no  industry,  but  tax  the  food  of  the  farmer 
and  laborer;  but  they  do  not  move  the  sympathies  of  the 
Commissioner.  He  does  not  propose  to  repeal  them,  for 
the  articles  they  burden  are  not  produced  in  England  or 
her  North  American  colonies.  They  were  imposed  as 
revenue  measures  during  a  great  war,  and  have  been 


tances,  but  exactly  this,  that  the  losses  or  taxation  prices  we  expected  did  not 
come,  but  that  the  articles  protected  have  been  cheapened,  some  of  them,  too, 
from  the  very  first.  Who  could  have  imagined  that  our  rough-handed,  half- 
trained  mechanics  would  be  able  to  hold  successful  competition  with  the  skilled 
workmen  of  Europe  in  the  manufacture  of  an  article  as  delicate  as  the  watch  ? 
And  yet  we  are  getting  our  watches  now  at  scarcely  more  than  half  the  former 
price,  and  are  even  selling  watches  at  a  profit  in  the  open  market  of  the  world. 
We  consented  to  make  a  loss,  but  the  gain  came  along  too  soon  to  let  us  distinctly 
see  it.—Buahnell,  "  Free  Trade  and  Protection." 


MB.  WELLS'  REPORT.  319 

cheerfully  endured  by  a  patriotic  people,  but  they  increase 
the  cost  of  living,  operate  as  a  burden  on  our  laboring 
people,  and  should  be  repealed  at  the  earliest  day  the  fin 
ancial  condition  of  the  country  will  permit. 

Mr.  Chairman,  there  are  other  taxes,  of  some  of  which 
the  people  justly  complain — taxes  that  burden  our  labor, 
consume  the  profits  of  capital,  and  paralyze  the  energy 
of  the  most  enterprising  among  us.     They  add  to  the 
cost   of  our    gas  and  our    travel,  whether  by  railroad, 
stage,  or  steamboat.     We  cannot  draw  our  own  money 
from  bank  or  make  a  payment  to  our  creditor  without » 
feeling  them.     They   touch  and   prick  us  at  all  points. 
Their  enforcement  requires  the  maintenance  of  a  special 
department   of  the   Government,    the   agents  of    which 
penetrate  inquisitorially  every  home  and  workshop  in  the 
land.     They  increase  the  cost  of  all  our  productions  and 
restrict  the  limits  of  our  commerce  by  shutting  our  over 
taxed  goods  out  of  markets  in  which  but  for  them  we 
might  compete  with  our  foreign  rivals.     They,  too,  were 
the  product  of  the  war.     The  necessities  in  which  it  in 
volved  us  gave  rise  to  the  system  of  internal  taxes  with 
its  Commissioner,  assessors,  collectors,  supervisors,  detect 
ives,  and  thousands  of  subordinates ;    and  sound  policy 
requires  that  those  duties  which,  while  they  protect  the 
wages  of  the  laboring  man  and  develop  the  resources  of 
the  country,  supply  the  Treasury  with  large  amounts  of 
revenue  should  be  retained,   and  that  these   direct  and 
inquisitorial  taxes  which  so  oppress  and  annoy  us  should 
be  removed  as  rapidly  as  possible.     The  repeal  of  these 
would  animate  all  our  industries;  but  the  repeal  of  the 
duties   recommended  by  the  Commissioner  would  flood 
our  country  with   the  productions  of  the  underpaid  la 
borers  of  Europe,  silence  countless  looms  and  spindles, 
close  our  factories,  extinguish  the  fires  in  our  furnaces 
and  rolling-mills,  and  leave  the  grain  of  the  husbandmen, 
for  which  there  is  now  no  market  in  Europe,  to  rot  in  the 
field  or  granary,  while  their  countrymen  and  former  cus 
tomers   starve.      However   ardently    Mr.    Commissioner 
Wells  may  desire  this  consummation,  I  trust  that  Con 
gress,  by  protecting  the  wages  of  the  Americajj^JjaliQrer, 
will  forever  avert  it. 


PEESONAL    EXPLANATION. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
JANUARY  20TH,  1870. 

The  House  being  in  session — 

Mr.  KelUy  said : 

I  ask  unanimous  consent  to  make  a  brief  personal  ex 
planation. 

The  /Speaker.  For  how  long  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.  Five  minutes. 

There  was  no  objection,  and  it  was  ordered  accordingly. 

Mr.  Kelky.  Mr.  Speaker :  I  send  to  the  Clerk's  desk  the 
St.  Louis  Democrat  of  January  17th,  1870,  and  ask  the 
Clerk  to  read  the  paragraph  I  have  marked. 

The  Clerk  read  as  follows : 

"  This  cheap  cry  of  British  gold  is  about  played  out.  There  are 
a  great  many  more  men  in  Congress  and  out  of  it,  who  are  bribed  to 
advocate  what  they  know  to  be  against  the  public  interest  by  Amer 
ican  gold  than  by  British.  We  might  easily  retort  on  Mr.  Kelley.  It 
would  be  easy  to  say  that  his  personal  interest,  to  the  extent  of 
$100,000,  in  iron  works  in  Irondale,  Ohio,  bribes  him  to  cast  a  vote 
against  the  public  welfare.  But  that  sort  of  argument  may  well  be 
left  altogether  to  those  who  have  no  better  at  command." 

Mr.  Kelley.  Mr.  Speaker :  I  have  called  the  attention 
of  the  House  to  this  paragraph,  not  by  reason  of  its  own 
importance,  but  because  T  have  from  time  to  time  seen  ar 
ticles  in  the  papers,  speaking  of  my  great  pecuniary  interest 
in  pig-iron.  I  did  not  know  how  to  account  for  them 
until  within  a  few  days  one  of  the  gentlemen  from  Ohio, 
[Mr.  Garfield,]  or  his  colleague,  [Mr.  Wilson,]  handed  me  a 
letter,  the  printed  heading  of  which  informed  me  that 
"  William  D.  Kelley  &  Sons  are  the  proprietors  of  Grant 
Furnace,  Ironton,  Ohio."  I  saw,  then,  that  those  who 
made  this  intimation  had,  at  least,  a  reasonable  basis  of 
fact.  I  want  to  say  that  I  do  not  know  my  namesake,  but 
was  pleased  to  hear  that  he  is  a  worthy  and  prosperous 
320 


PERSONAL     EXPLANATION.  321 

man,  with  a  large  family  of  sons  about  him,  who  are  labori 
ously  aiding  him  in  his  business,  while  I,  less  fortunate, 
happen  to  have  but  one  son,  who  is  not  yet  fifteen  years  of 
age.  I  am  not  interested  in  a  foot  of  land  in  the  state  of 
Ohio.  I  never  had  means  enough,  having  been  a  lawyer 
whose  services  were  not  liberally  requited,  to  embark  in 
manufacturing  pig-iron  or  any  other  commodity.  Nor  do 
I  own,  directly  or  indirectly,  one  dollar  of  capital  or  stock 
in  any  mining  or  manufacturing  interest  in  the  world. 
God  knows  that,  as  I  feel  years  creeping  over  me,  I  regret 
rny  past  indifference  to  pecuniary  matters,  and  wish  that  I 
had  been  able  to  acquire  some  such  property 

21 


FAEMERS,  MECHANICS,  AND  LABORERS  NEED 
PROTECTION— CAPITAL  CAN  TAKE  CARE 
OF  ITSELF. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
MARCH  25,  1870. 

The  House  being  in  the  Committee  of  the  Whole,  and  having 
under  consideration  the  bill  (H.  R.  No.  1068)  to  amend  existing 
laws  relating  to  the  duties  on  imports,  and  for  other  purposes — 

Mr.  Kelley  said : 

Mr.  Chairman:  I  presume  that  gentlemen  who  have 
listened  to  the  course  of  this  debate  expect  me  to  apolo 
gize  for  having  been  born  in  Pennsylvania  and  adhering 
to  my  native  State.  From  what  has  been  said  it  seems 
that  her  people  are  regarded  by  free  traders  as  a  discredit 
able  community,  and  she,  in  her  corporate  capacity,  as  an 
object  of  odium. 

Sir,  I  arn  proud  of  dear  old  Pennsylvania,  my  native 
State.  She  was  the  first  to  adopt  the  Federal  Constitu 
tion,  and  was  in  fact  the  key-stone  of  the  Federal  arch, 
holding  together  the  young  Union  when  it  consisted  of 
but  thirteen  States,  and  she  is  to-day  preeminently  the 
representative  State  of  the  Union.  You  cannot  strike 
her  so  that  her  industries  shall  bleed  without  those  of 
other  States  feeling  it,  and  feeling  it  vitally.  She  has  no 
cotton,  or  sugar,  or  rice  fields ;  but  apart  from  these  she  is 
identified  with  every  interest  represented  upon  this  floor. 

Gentlemen  from  the  rocky  coast  of  New  England  and 
those  from  the  more  fertile  and  hospitable  shores  of  the 
Pacific,  especially  the  gentlemen  from  the  beautifully 
wooded  shores  of  Puget  Sound,  complain  that  their  ship 
yards  are  idle.  Hers,  alas !  are  also  idle,  although  they 
are  the  yards  in  which  were  built  the  largest  wooden  ship 
the  Government  ever  put  afloat,  and  the  largest  sailing 
iron-clad  it  ever  owned.  She  has  her  commerce  and 
sympathizes  with  young  San  Francisco  and  our  great 
322 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  XEED  PROTECTION.        323 

commercial  metropolis,  New  York.  She  was  for  long 
years  the  leading  port  of  entry  in  the  country.  She  still 
maintains  a  respectable  direct  commerce  -  and  imports 
very  largely  through  New  York,  for  the  same  reasons 
that  London  does  through  Liverpool,  and  Paris  through 
Havre. 

Are  you  interested  in  the  production  of  fabrics,  whether 
of  silk,  wool,  flax,  or  cotton  ?  If  so  her  interests  are 
identical  with  yours,  for  she  employs  as  many  spindles 
and  looms  as  any  New  England  State,  and  their  produc 
tions  are  as  various  and  as  valuable.  Are  your  interests 
in  the  commerce  upon  the  lakes?  Then  go  with  me  to 
her  beautiful  city  of  Erie  and  behold  how  Pennsylvania 
sympathizes  with  all  your  interests  there.  Are  your 
interests  identified  with  the  navigation  of  the  Mississippi 
and  seeking  markets  for  your  products  at  the  mouth  of 
that  river  and  on  the  Gulf?  I  pray  you  to  i\emember 
that  two  of  the  navigable  sources  of  the  American  "Father 
of  Waters"  take  their  rise  in  the  bosom  of  her  mountains, 
and  that  for  many  decades  her  enterprising  and  industri 
ous  people  have  been  plucking  from  her  hills  bituminous 
coal  and  floating  it  past  the  coal-fields  of  Ohio,  Kentucky, 
Indiana,  Illinois,  Missouri,  and  other  coal-bearing  States, 
to  meet  that  of  England  in  the  market  of  New  Orleans 
and  try  to  drive  it  th'ence.  Gentlemen  from  the  gold 
regions,  where  were  the  miners  trained  who  first  brought 
to  light,  with  any  measure  of  science  and  experience,  the 
vast  resources  in  gold  and  silver-bearing  quartz  of  the 
Pacific  slope?  They  went  to  you  from  the  coal,  iron, 
and  zinc  mines  of  Pennsylvania.  There  they  had  learned 
to  sink  the  shaft,  run  the  drift,  handle  ore,  and  crush  or 
smelt  it.  It  was  experience  acquired  in  her  mines  that 
brought  out  the  wealth  of  California  almost  as  magically 
as  we  were  taught  in  childhood  to  believe  that  Aladdin's 
lamp  could  convert  base  articles  into  gold. 

Nor,  sir,  are  the  interests  of  Pennsylvania  at  variance 
with  those  of  the  great  agricultural  States?  Before  her 
Kepresentatives  in  the  two  Houses  of  Congress  had  united 
their  voices  with  those  of  gentlemen  from  the  West  to 
make  magnificent  land  grants  for  the  purpose  of  con 
structing  railroads  in  different  directions  across  the  tree 
less  but  luxuriously  fertile  prairies,  Pennsylvania  was 
first  among  the  great  agricultural  States.  And  to-day 
her  products  of  the  field,  the  garden,  the  orchard,  and  the 


324:        FARMKR3,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 

dairy  equal  in  value  those  of  any  other  State.  Gentle 
men  from  Ohio,  notwithstanding  the  statement  of  the 
gentleman  from  Iowa  [Mr.  Allison]  that  you*  alone  manufac 
ture  Scotch  pig-iron  and  suffer  from  its  importation,  as 
you  alone  have  the  black  band  ore  from  which  it  is  made, 
is  it  not  true  that  when  Pennsylvania  demands  a  tariff 
that  will  protect  the  wages  of  her  laborers  in  the  mine,  the 
quarry,  and  the  furnace,  she  does  but  defend  the  interests 
and  rights  of  your  laborers  and  those  of  every  other  iron- 
bearing  State  in  the  Union  ?  Gentlemen  from  Virginia, 
Maryland,  and  North  Carolina,  Pennsylvania  is  de 
nounced  because  she  pleads  for  a  duty  on  bituminous 
coal  that  will  enable  you  to  develop  your  magnificent 
coal-fields  in  competition  with  Nova  Scotia.  The  coal 
of  your  tide- water  fields  is  far  more  available  than  that 
of  the  inland  fields  of  Pennsylvania,  which  depend  on 
railroads  for  transportation.  On  the  banks  of  the  James, 
the  Dan,  and  other  navigable  rivers,  lie  coal-beds  to 
within  a  few  hundred  feet  of  which  the  vessels  which  are 
to  carry  the  coal  may  come,  and  they  lie  nearer  to  the 
markets  of  New  England  than  those  of  your  colonial 
rivals  at  Nova  Scotia;  and  when  you  were  not  here  and 
Virginia  and  North  Carolina  were  voiceless  on  this  floor, 
I  pleaded  with  the  Thirty-Ninth  Congress  to  retain  the 
duty  of  $1  25  per  ton  in  order  that  Virginia  and  North 
Carolina,  soon  to  be  reconstructed,  should  be  able  to  pro 
duce  fuel  for  New  England  better  and  cheaper  than  Nova 
Scotia  does,  and  that  it  should  be  carried  in  New  England 
built  vessels,  so  that  the  thousands  of  people  employed 
in  producing  and  transporting  it  should  create  a  mar 
ket  for  the  grain  of  the  western  farmer  and  the  produc 
tions  of  American  workshops.  I  might,  Mr.  Chairman, 
extend  the  illustration  of  the  identity  of  the  interests 
of  Pennsylvania  with  those  of  the  people  of  every  other 
State,  but  will  not  detain  the  committee  longer  on  that 
subject.  In  leaving  it  I  however  reiterate  my  assertion 
that  you  cannnot  strike  a  blow  at  her  industries  without 
the  people  of  at  least  half  a  score  of  other  States  feeling  it 
as  keenly  as  she  will.  She  asks  no  boon  from  Congress. 
Her  people,  whether  they  depend  for  subsistence  upon 
their  daily  toil,  or  have  been  so  fortunate  as  to  inherit  or 
acquire  capital,  seek  no  special  privileges  from  the  Gov 
ernment.  They  demand  that  we  shall  legislate  for  the 
promotion  of  the  equal  welfare  of  all.  They  know  that 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.        325 

they  must  share  the  common  fate,  and  that  their 
prosperity  depends  upon  that  of  their  countrymen  at 
large. 

PROTECTION    CHEAPENS    COMMODITIES. 

Mr.  Chairman,  many  gentlemen  have  spoken  since  this 
bill  was  made  a  special  order,  and  a  great  deal  has  been 
said  upon  the  general  subject  of  free  trade  and  protection, 
and  but  little  about  the  provisions  embodied  in  the  bill 
before  the  committee.  I  am  probably  expected  to  pro 
ceed  at  once  to  reply  to  the  remarks  of  my  colleague  on 
the  Committee  of  Ways  and  Means,  from  Iowa  [Mr.  Alli 
son],  who  has  just  closed  his  remarks.  But  I  may  as  well 
before  proceeding  to  do  so  take  a  shot  into  the  flock 
generally.  The  birds  have  all  sung  the  same  song.  My 
colleague  has  gone  more  fully  into  the  details  of  the  bill 
than  any  of  the  others.  But  his  statements  are  all  in  har 
mony  with  those  of  the  several  gentlemen  who  have  given 
us  the  doctrines  of  the  chief  of  the  Bureau  of  Statistics, 
D.  A.  Wells,  in  their  own  admirable  way.  I  propose  to 
allude  to  some  of  their  remarks. 

The  gentleman  from  New  York  [Mr.  Brooks]  in  open 
ing  the  debate  promised  to  mount  a  peddler's  wagon  and 
ride  through  the  agricultural  districts  of  the  country, 
exhibiting  hoes,  shovels,  axes,  chains,  knives  and  forks, 
cottons,  and  woolens,  and  demonstrate  to  the  people  the 
unjust  and  enormous  taxation  imposed  on  them  by  the 
existing  tariff.  If  he  will  redeem  this  promise,  making 
candid  statements  of  facts  to  the  people,  I  will  con 
tribute  toward  his  expenses  and  pray  for  the  success 
of  his  mission. 

Mr.  Brooks,  of  New  York.     How  much? 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  will  contribute  25  per  cent.,  and  what 
may  be  more  effective,  will  try  to  make  an  arrangement 
by  which  the  proprietors  of  Flagg's  Pain  Exterminator 
will  give  the  gentleman  a  seat  in  one  of  their  wagons 
while  going  through  the  country.  By  no  other  means 
could  he  so  perfectly  demonstrate  the  fact  that  duties 
which  are  really  protective  are  never  a  tax,  and  that  pro 
tection  invariably  cheapens  commodities.  So  invariably 
is  this  true  that  protective  America,  France,  and  Germany 
are  crowding  free-trade  England  out  of  the  markets  of  the 
world  with  the  articles  named  by  the  gentleman  while  pur 
chasing  from  her  the  materials  of  which  they  are  made, 


326       FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 

and  paying  protective  duties  on  every  pound  of  them. 
This  is  not  mere  declamation.  It  is  truth  demonstrated 
by  experience.*  The  starving  mechanics  of  England 
know  it,  and  have  at  length  succeeded  in  bringing  it 
officially  to  the  knowledge  of  Parliament.  I  have  before 
me  the  report  of  a  parliamentary  commission  which 
proves,  that  notwithstanding  our  duties  on  iron  and  steel, 
our  knives  and  forks,  horseshoe  nails,  etc.,  are  crowding 
England  out  of  general  markets,  that  our  hoes,  shovels, 


*  A  New  York  correspondent  of  the  Sheffield  Independent  recently  wrote  to  that 
paper  as  follows : 

"  There  icill  be  no  legislation  this  session  on  the  tariff,  which  means  no  change  in 
actual  operation  until  1873,  at  nearest.  The  opposition,  therefore,  which  Sheffield 
manufacturers  have  to  encounter  from  native  and  protected  industry  will  not  be 
abated  for  two,  if  not  three  years  to  come.  This  is  not  encouraging  for  such  Shef 
field  trades  as  the  saw  trade,  for  instance,  which  is  now  nearly  wholly  driven 
from  this  market.  It  is  no  use  denying,  either,  that  during  the  respite  which  such 
trades  here  as  the  spring  knife  and  table  knife  trade  will  have,  their  opposition  will 
become  more  formidable.  It  is  true  that  the  manufacturers  of  table  knives  here 
seem  to  have  gone  as  low  as  they  can  in  price,  and  that  Sheffield  goods  can  just 
compete  and  that  is  all,  and  more  than  that  no  one  pretends  that  American  table 
knife  concerns  are  making  money.  But  there  they  stand,  gigantic  establishments, 
each  toith  its  little  world  of  loorkmen  round  it,  the  representatives  of  much  labor  and 
capital  invested  under  legal  sanction,  and,  therefore,  claiming  tender  consideration 
•in  any  future  financial  adjustment.  The  American-made  one  and  two  blade 
pocket  knives  are  beginning  to  push  out  similar  goods  made  in  Sheffield  all 
over  the  West  and  Northwest.  They  run  chiefly  on  such  styles,  in  one  blade, 
as  cost  from  three  to  six  shillings  per  dozen  in  Sheffield,  and  such  two  blades 
as  cost  from  six  to  ten  shillings.  In  price  they  are  about  the  same  for  the  same 
pattern,  but  in  fitting,  finish  and  style,  very  much  superior.  The  steel  used,  as 
a  rule,  is  good,  and  the  blades  above  complaint.  Their  patterns  are  not  numer 
ous.  Indeed,  they  adopt  precisely  the  same  tactics  as  those  used  by  the  table 
knife  manufacturers  when  they  first  commenced  that  competition  with  Sheffield 
which  has  ended,  practically,  in  the  transference  of  that  business  to  this 
country.  They  choose  a  few  good  popular  styles,  they  invent  and  use  machin 
ery  for  every  process  possible,  they  put  in  good  blades,  neatly  ground,  splendid 
ly  marked,  and  turn  out  every  knife  the  precise  duplicate  of  every  other. 
Hence  the  uniformity,  reliability,  and  general  style  which  is  found  in  no 
Sheffield  goods,  except  those  of  standard  makers.  I  regard  it  as  absolutely 
certain  that  the  Sheffield  spring-knife  trade  has,  so  far  as  this  market  is  con 
cerned,  to  pass  through  precisely  the  same  stages  as  those  through  which  the 
Table-knife  trade  has  passed.  Gradually,  the  methods  used  here  will  push  out 
all  medium  and  common  imported  goods;  then  will  come  a  time  of  utter  stagna 
tion  and  bewilderment  among  the  masters  and  men  usually  working  for  the 
United  States  trade;  then  none  but  goods  with  a  name  will  remain  saleable 
here;  and,  finally,  it  is  to  be  hoped,  as  in  the  sister  business,  enterprising 
manufacturers  will  arise  in  Sheffield  who,  adopting  machinery,  will  speedily 
rejrain  the  lost  ground  and  bring  back  employment.  There  is  no  excuse, 
however,  after  past  experience,  for  such  a  crisis  arising.  The  machinery  and 
processes  used  here  are  inexpensive,  though  eifective — so  effective,  indeed,  that 
one  of  the  oldest  and  most  energetic  and  successful  of  the  Sheffield  manufac 
turers,  after  investigating  them  on  the  spot  here  last  year,  could  lay  no  more 
consolation  to  his  heart  than  the  old  system  'would  last  his  time  out.'  If  the 
'trade'  would  send  out,  at  their  expense,  two  intelligent  practical  men,  and  let 
them  spend  a  month  here  and  probe  the  subject  to  the  bottom,  they  could,  at  an 
outlay  of  £150  or  £200,  save  their  fellowworkmen  from  a  world  of  coming  want 
and  perplexity.  Why  not  do  it  ?" 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  XEED  PROTECTION.      327 

and  axes  are  bought  by  the  people  of  all  her  colonies ; 
and  that  our  locks,  sewing-machines,  and  other  produc 
tions  of  iron  and  steel  are  underselling  hers  in  the  streets 
of  London  and  Birmingham.  Here  is  the  "report  from 
the  select  committee  on  scientific  instruction,  togethei 
with  the  proceedings  of  the  committee,  minutes  of  evi 
dence,  and  appendix,"  ordered  by  the  House  of  Commons 
to  be  printed  15th  July,  1868.  It  is  a  ponderous  volume 
and  replete  with  instruction. 

I  find  on  page  479  a  paper  handed  in  by  Mr.  Field, 
containing  a  "list  of  some  articles  made  in  Birmingham 
and  the  hardware  districts,  which  are  largely  replaced  in 
common  markets  of  the  world  by  the  productions  of  other 
countries."  The  author  states  that  "  this  list  might  be 
immensely  extended  by  further  investigation,  which  the 
shortness  of  time  has  not  permitted."  Among  the  articles 
enumerated  are  hoes — and  I  ask  the  attention  of  the 
gentleman  from  New  York  [Mr.  Brooks] — 

"  Hoes  :  for  cotton  and  other  purposes,  an  article  of  large  con- 
sumptifcn." 

On  this  article  the  report  remarks : 

"  The  United  States  compete  with  us,  for  their  own  use  and,  to 
some  extent,  for  export." 

Then  we  have  the  following : 

"Axes  :  for  felling  trees,  etc.,  an  article  of  large  consumption. 
The  United  States  supply  our  colonies  and  the  world  with  the  best 
article." 

Then  there  are : 

"  Carpenters'  broad-axes  ;  carpenters'  and  coopers'  adzes  ;  coopers' 
tools,  various  sorts ;  shoemakers'  hammers  and  tools." 

With  regard  to  these,  "  Germany  and  the  United  States  " 
are  mentioned  as  the  countries  "  whose  products  are  be 
lieved  to  have  replaced  those  of  England." 

Speaking  of  cut  nails,  the  report  says  : 

"  The  United  States  export  to  South  America  and  our  colonies." 

And,  with  regard  to  horseshoe  nails,  which  we  protect 
by  a  duty  of  5  cents  per  pound,  and  the  manufacture  of 
which  under  that  ample  protection  has  been  cheapened 
and  so  perfected,  that  this  parliamentary  report  announces 
that  they  exclude  the  English  from  common  markets,  be 
cause  they  are — 

•'  Beautifully  made  by  machinery  in  the  Unite^  States." 


328     FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,   NEED   PROTECTION. 

Mr.  Winans.  Will  the  gentleman  allow  me  to  ask  him 
a  question  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.  Not  at  present.  I  will  be  glad,  when  I 
have  got  a  little  further  into  rny  subject,  to  answer,  but  not 
at  this  point. 

Mr.  Winans.     My  question  comes  in  properly  here 

Mr.  Kelley.     I  will  hear  the  gentleman. 

Mr.  Winans.  I  understand  that  the  purport  of  what  the 
gentleman  has  been  reading  is  to  show  that  the  United 
States,  notwithstanding  the  high  tariff — 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  do  not  yield  to  the  gentleman  for  a 
speech.  If  he  has  a  question  to  put,  let  him  put  it 
squarely. 

Mr.  Winans.  I  merely  wished  to  make  a  preliminary 
remark.  But,  without  any  preliminaries,  my  question  is 
this:  If,  under  the  operation  of  our  tariff)  American  manu 
facturers  could  compete  with  British  manufacturers  in 
British  markets,  why  should  the  high  tariff  be  maintained 
to  oppress  our  own  people  ?  * 

Mr.  Kelley.  The  gentleman's  question  will  be  abun 
dantly  answered  as  I  proceed.  But  I  may  remark  here, 
that,  if  by  protection  you  secure  to  your  capital  and  indus 
try  a  certain  market,  capitalists  will  invest  in  the  erection  of 
workshops,  and  purchase  of  machinery,  and  by  high  wages 
will  induce  skilled  and  ingenious  workmen  to  leave  their 

*  Such  a  tariff  is  the  only  means  of  protecting  our  industries  from  overthrow 
by  foreign  conspirators.  The  British  Government  applauds  such  conspiracies, 
and  the  American  Government  should  defend  its  people  against  them.  Though 
the  following  extract  from  the  report  of  a  Parliamentary  commission  made  in 
1854  appears  on  page  41,  I  cite  it  here  as  a  conclusive,  though  not  the  only 
answer  to  the  question  of  Judge  Winans  : 

"  I  believe  that  the  laboring  classes  generally,  in  the  manufacturing  districts 
of  this  country,  and  especially  in  the  iron  and  coal  districts,  are  very  little  aware 
of  the  extent  to  which  they  are  often  indebted  for  their  being  employed  at  all  to 
the  immense  losses  which  their  employers  voluntarily  incur  in  bad  times,  in  order 
to  destroy  foreign  competition,  and  to  gain  and  keep  possession  of  foreign  markets. 
Authentic  instances  are  well  known  of  employers  having,  in  such  times,  carried 
on  their  work  at  a  loss  amounting,  in  the  aggregate,  to  three  or  four  hundred 
thousand  pounds  in  the  course  of  as  many  years.  If  the  efforts  of  those  who  en 
courage  the  combinations  to  restrict  Ihe  amount  of  labor,  and  to  produce  strikes, 
were  to  be  successful  for  any  length  of  time,  the  great  accumulations  of  capital 
could  no  longer  be  made,  ichich  enable  a  few  of  the  most  wealthy  capitalists  to  over 
whelm  all  foreign  competition  in  times  of  great  depression,  and  thus  to  clear  the 
way  fdfc  the  whole  trade  to  step  in  when  prices  revive,  and  to  carry  on  a  great 
business  before  foreign  capital  can  again  accumulate  to  such  an  extent  as  to  be 
able  to  establish  a  competition  in  prices  with  any  chance  of  success.  The  large 
capitals  of  this  country  are  the  great  instruments  of  warfare  against  the  competing 
capitalists  of  foreign  countries,  and  are  the  most  essential  instruments  now  re 
maining  by  which  our  manufacturing  supremacy  can  be  maintained;  the  other 
elements — cheap  labor,  abundance  of  raw  materials,  means  of  communication, 
and  skilled  labor — being  rapidly  in  process  of  being  realized." 


FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,    NEED   PROTECTION.    329 

homes  and  accept  employment  on  better  terms  among 
strangers.  Thus,  under  protection,  capital  has  been  in 
vested,  and  skilled  laborers  gathered,  and  our  inventive 
genius  has  improved  the  methods  of  production,  until  we 
have  come  to  be  able  to  make  the  articles  mentioned  in 
this  list  cheaper  than  free-trade  England.  But  withdraw 
this  protection,  and  you  will  enable  foreigners,  with  the 
immense  accumulations  of  capital  they  possess,  to  combine 
and  undersell  our  home  manufacturers  for  a  few  years,  and 
thus  destroy  them.  The  purpose  of  a  protective  tariff  is 
that  of  the  fence  around  an  orchard  in  a  district  where 
cattle  are  permitted  to  run  at  large.  I  believe  I  have  an 
swered  the  question  of  the  gentleman. 

The  gentleman  from  New  York  [Mr.  Brooks]  said  that 
his  heart  glowed  with  pride  when,  in  a  distant  foreign  land, 
he  saw  a  camel  robed  in  American  muslin.  The  value  of 
the  kind  of  muslin  used  for  such  a  purpose  is  almost  all  in 
the  cost  of  the  raw  material ;  it  is  woven  of  the  coarsest 
yarn.  I  wish  he  had  been  in  Abyssinia  in  1867  ;  how  his 
pulse  would  have  quickened  and  his  heart  expanded  as  he 
saw  that  while  England  was  wreathing  the  latest  glory 
around  her  brow  by  moving  an  army  into  the  heart  of 
Abyssinia  for  the  relief  of  a  few  of  her  subjects,  the  inge 
nuity  and  protected  industry  of  the  United  States  was  from 
day  to  day  providing  that  army  with  water. 

For  proof  of  this  I  turn  again  to  the  Parliamentary  re 
port.  It  says  :  "  Pumps  of  various  sorts  largely  exported 
from  the  United  States."  To  this  announcement  is  added 
the  following  note :  "  an  American  pump^finding  water  for 
the  Abyssinian  expedition."  Those  pumps,  unlike  the 
coarse  cotton,  the  sight  of  which  so  rejoiced  the  gentleman, 
involved  a  preponderant  percentage  of  labor — labor  for  the 
digging  and  carrying  of  the  coal,  ore,  and  limestone,  and 
on  through  successive  grades  of  labor  to  their  completion, 
so  that  probably  90  per  cent,  of  their  cost  was  labor. 
But  I  submit  the  list  entire  for  the  gentleman's  considera 
tion  : 


330     FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,    NEED   PROTECTION. 

Appendix  No.  22  to  the  report  from  the  select  Committee  on  Scien. 

tific  Instruction,  together  with  the  proceedings  of  the  committee, 

minutes  of  evidence,  and  appendix. 
[Ordered  by  the  House  of  Commons  to  be  printed,  15th  July,  1868.] 

PAPER    HANDED    IN    BY    MR.    FIELD. 

List  of  some  articles  made  in  Birmingham  and  the  hardware  district, 
which  are  largely  replaced  in  common  markets  of  the  world  by 
the  productions  of  other  countries  : 


Articles  or  class  of  articles. 


Carpenters'  tools : 

As  hammers,  plyers,  pincers, 
compasses,  hand  and  bench  vices. 
Chains : 

Of  light  description,  where  the 
cost  is  more  in  labor  than  in  ma 
terial,  as  halter  chains  and  bow- 
ties,  and  such  like. 

Frying-pans  of  fine  finish 

Wood -handled     spades      and 
shovels,  an  article  of  very  large 
consumption. 
Hoes  : 

For  cotton  and  other  purposes, 
an  article  of  large  consumption. 

Axes : 

For  felling  trees,  etc.,  an  article 
of  large  consumption. 

Carpenters'  broadaxes. 

Carpenters'  and  coopers'  adzes. 

Coopers'  tools,  vafious  sorts. 

Shoemakers'      hammers     and 
tools. 
Machetes : 

For  cutting  sugar  canes,  an  im 
portant  article. 
Nails  : 


Cut 

Wrought , 

Point  de  Paris  (wire  nails.) , 


Horse-nails 
Pumps  : 


Of  various  sorts- 


Country  -whose  products  are  believed  to 
have  replaced  those  of  this  district,  in  whole 
or  in  part. 


I  Germany  chiefly. 

1 


Germany. 

France. 

1  United  States  exports  them  to 
["     all  our  colonies. 

{United  States  compete  with  us 
for  their  own  use,  and,  to 
some  extent,  for  export. 

United  States  supply  our  colo 
nies  and  the  world  with  the 
best  article. 


Germany  and  the  United  States. 


I  Believed  to  be  now  Germany. 

f  United  States  export  to  South 
{      America  and  our  colonies. 

Belgium. 

(  French  and  Belgian  largely  su- 
{      persede  English, 
f  Beautifully  made  by  machinery 
|      in  the  United  States. 

( Largely  exported  by    United 

States, 
j  NOTE. —  An    American    pump 

finding  water  for  the  Abys- 
[     sinian  expedition. 


FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,    NEED   PROTECTION.     331 


LIST.— Continued. 


Articles  or  class  of  articles. 


Agricultural  implements  : 

Plows,  cotton-gins,  cultivators, 
kibbling  machines,  corn-crushers, 
churns,  rice-hullers,  mowing-ma 
chines,  hay  rakes. 

Sewing  machines 

Lamps : 

For  use  with  petroleum,  now 
an  article  of  very  large  consump 
tion. 


Lamps  for  the  table. 


Tin-ware  : 

Tinned   spoons,  cooks'   ladles, 
arid  various  culinary  articles  of 
fine  manufacture  and  finish. 
Locks  : 

Door  locks,  chest  locks,  drawer 
locks,  cupboard  locks  in  great 
variety. 

Door  latches  in  great  variety. 

Curry-combs 

Traps  : 

Eat,  beaver,  and  fox 


Gimlets  and  augers  (twisted)... 

Brass-foundery,  cast : 

As   hinges,    brass  hooks,   and 
castors,    in   great   variety ;    door 
buttons,    sash    fasteners,    and     a 
great  variety  of  other  articles. 
Brass-foundery,  stamped  : 

As  curtain  pins  and  bands,  cor 
nices,  gilt  beading,  and  a  great 
variety  of  other  brass-foundery. 

Needles : 

An  article  of  large  consump 
tion. 

Fish-hooks 

Guns  : 

A  great  variety  of  sporting 
guns,  articles  of  large  consump 
tion,  formerly  entirely  from  Bir 
mingham. 

Breech-loading  muskets  and  re 
volver  pistols. 


Country  whose  products  are  believed  to  have 
replaced  those  of  this  district,  in  whole  or 
in  part. 


Many  articles  similar  to  these 
are  exported  by  United 
States  to  common  markets. 

United  States. 

The  United  States  petroleum 
lamps  supplant  the  English 
in  India  and  China. 

French  even  imported  to  Eng 
land. 


France. 


United    States,    France,     and 
Germany. 

United  States  exports  to  Cana- 

da. 
United  States  and  France. 

United  States  export  to  Canada. 

United  States  export  to  Cana- 

da  and  probably  elsewhere. 


These  articles  in  great  variety, 
{-      are  now  extensively  exported 
from  France  and  Germany. 


|  These  articles,  in  great  variety, 
>  are  now  extensively  exported 
)  from  Germany  and  France. 


f  Mostly     Germany,      (Rhenish 
<      Prussia,)   even   imported  to 
(      England, 
Believed  Germany. 

Now  exported  largely  from 
Liege,  Belgium,  and  Etienne, 
France. 

United  States. 


812       FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,   NEED   PROTECTION. 


LIST.—  Continued. 


Articles  or  class  of  articles. 


Watches  and  clocks- 


Iron 

Glass: 

For  windows,  an  article  of  large 
consumption;  spectacle  and  all 
other  glass. 


Table  glass. 


Swords 

Jewelry  : 

Gold,  gilt,  and  fancy  steel,  in 
very  great  variety. 

Small  steel  trinkets : 

As  bag  and  purse  clasps,  steel 
buttons,  chains,  key  rings,  and 
other  fastenings,  and  many  others 
in  great  variety. 

Leather  bags,  with  clasps, 
purses,  and  courier  bags,  etc. 


Buttons  : 
Mother  of  pearl- 
Horn  


Porcelain   (formerly    Minton's 
of  Stoke). 

Steel  buttons  (formerly  Bolton 
&  Watt's). 

Florentine  or  lasting  boot-but 
tons. 

Steel  pens,  pen-holders,  brass 
scales  and  weights. 

Iron    gas-tubing 

Elastic  belts  with  metal  fasten 
ings. 

Brass  chandeliers   and  gas-fit 
tings. 

Harness  buckles  and  furniture. 

German-silver     spoons,    forks, 
etc. 
Locks : 

Best  trunk,  door,  and  cabinet 
locks. 


Country  whose  products  are  believed  to  have 
replaced  those  of  this  district,  in  whole  or 
in  part. 


'Switzerland  and  France  import 
into  England,  United  States, 
and  France. 

[NOTE.— Watches  made  in  the 
Unite'd    States   interchange 
able,  by  machinery.] 
Belgium. 

1  Belgium  supplants  ours  in  our 
["     own  colonies. 

f  Believed  to  be  Belgium    and 
\      France. 
Prussia  and  Belgium. 

{France  and  Germany.  These 
articles  are  even  imported 
into  England. 

j  France    and  Germany.     Many 
V      of  these  even  imported  into 
-  England. 

Austria,    France,  and    Eussia. 
We  believe   about  all  these 
articles  sold  in  England  are 
L     imported. 

Vienna,  imported  to  England. 

France,  imported  to  England. 
f  France      entirely     superseded 
•j      English,    and    imported    to 
(      England  largely. 

France. 
Germany. 

I  France. 
Germany 
•  Germany. 

>  France  and  Prussia. 


France,  Austria,  and  Prussia. 


Prussia  and  France. 


FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,    NEED   PROTECTION.     333 


LIST.— Contin  ued. 


Articles  or  class  of  articles. 


Country  whose  products  are  believei  to  have 
replaced  those  of  this  district,  in  whole  or 
in  part. 


Umbrella  furniture 

Horn  Combs 

Pearl  and  tortoise  shell  arti 
cles. 

Iron  wire 

Iron  and  brass  hooks  arid  eyes. 

Bronzed  articles 

Hollow  wares,  enameled 

Optical  instruments. 

Mathematical  instruments. 

Japanned  wares 

Bits  and  stirrups 

Coach  springs  and  axle-trees. . 

Electro-plated  wares  ;  (custo 
mers  preferring  French  goods.) 

Gas-fittings 

Weighing  machines 

Plumbers'  brass-foundery 

Table  glass-ware 

Door  locks 

Machines  for  domestic  purposes, 
as  sausage  machines,  coffee-mills, 
and  washing-machines. 

Nuts  and  bolts 

Penknives  and  scissors 

Stamped  brass  ware  (certain 
kinds). 

American   "  notions,"   as  buc 
kets,   clothes-pegs,  washing    and 
agricultural  machines. 
Cutlery : 

In  great  variety:  scissors, 
light-edge  tools,  such  as  chisels, 
etc. 

Pins  for  piano-strings  and  other 
small  fittings  for  pianos. 

Silver  wire  for  binding  the  bars, 
strings  of  pianos,  etc. 

This  list  might  be  immensely  extended  by  further  investigation, 
which  the  shortness  of  time  has  not  permitted. 


France  and  Prussia. 
Prussia. 

\  France  and  Austria. 

Prussia  and  Belgium. 
Prussia  and  France. 
Prussia  and  France. 
France  and  Prussia. 

\  France,  Austria,  and  Bavaria. 

Germany  and  France. 
Belgium  and  France. 
France. 

\  France. 

United  States. 
United  States. 
United  States. 
United  States. 
United  States. 

I  United  States. 

United  States. 
United  States. 

United  States. 


United  States. 


Germany. 


France. 


THE  INTERNAL  REVENUE  SYSTEM — IT  IS  EXPENSIVE  AND 
INQUISITORIAL,  AND  SHOULD  BE  ABOLISHED  AT  THE 
EARLIEST  POSSIBLE  DAY. 

At  a  later  stage  of  the  debate  the  gentleman  from  Ohio 
[Mr.  Stevenson]  presented  bis  views  on  the  general  subject. 


334     FAKMERS,    MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION'. 

He  "had  previously  denounced  the  protectionists  of  the 
House  as  a  faction,  and  now  deplores  the  fact  that  "the 
beautiful  idea,"  free  trade,  "cannot  be  wholly  realized 
until  the  commercial  millennium."  He  will,  however,  do 
all  he  can  to  hasten  its  triumph.  In  this  direction  he  goes 
further  than  Calhoun  or  any  southern  leader  ever  went. 
His  is  a  manufacturing  and  agricultural  district,  yet  he 
not  only  echoes  the  demand  of  the  gentleman  from  the  free- 
trade  commercial  city  of  New  York  for  free  coal,  iron, 
salt,  and  lumber,  and  a  general  reduction  of  the  tariff,  but 
leaps  beyond  him,  and  proposes  to  give  permanence  to  the 
system  of  internal  taxes,  which  was  established  as  a  tem 
porary  war  measure,  and  which  costs  annually  over 
$8,000,000,  maintains  an  army  of  tens  of  thousands  of 
office-holders,  and  makes  inquisition  into  the  private  affairs 
of  every  citizen,  and  would  simply  remove  from  it  "  irrita 
ting,  petty,  useless,  and  vexatious  elements."  Sir,  the 
gentleman  cannot  be  ignorant  of  the  fact  that  every  dollar 
drawn  from  the  people  by  these  taxes  is  so  much  added  to 
the  cost  of  the  productions  of  the  farm  and  workshop,  and 
operates  as  a  bonus  to  the  foreign  competitors  of  our 
farmers  and  mechanics  in  common  markets.  But  even 
this  will  not  content  him.  He  grieves  that  other  and  more 
onerous  taxes  cannot  constitutionally  be  levied  on  the 
'farms,  workshops,  and  homes  of  the  people  of  Ohio  and 
the  rest  of  the  country.  On  this  point  he  gives  forth  no 
uncertain  sound.  He  hopes  the  Constitution  will  yet  be  so 
amended  as  to  constrain  every  owner  of  a  farm  or  cross 
roads  blacksmith's  shop  to  make  the  acquaintance  of  a 
collector  of  United  States  taxes.  On  this  point  he  said  : 

"  In  fact,  I  incline  to  the  opinion  that  one  of  the  errors  committed 
by  our  forefathers  in  framing  the  Constitution — and  since  we  have 
amended  it  in  such  material  matters  lately,  we  can  afford  to  say  that 
they  did  commit  some  errors  in  framing  it — was  in  not  permitting 
direct  taxation  upon  property  according  to  its  value.  And  some 
day  I  trust  the  Constitution  will  permit  the  Government  to  levy 
taxes  upon  property  according  to  its  value.  But  until  that  day,  as 
long  as  the  debt  remains  a  material  burden,  we  must,  in  my  judg 
ment,  retain  the  less  objectionable  and  burdensome  parts  of  both 
systems  of  taxation." 

Mr.  Stevenson.  I  want  to  know  whether  the  gentleman 
does  not  consider  that  the  material  part  of  the  internal 
revenue  taxes  must  be  continued  while  the  debt  remains? 

Mr.  Kelky.  No,  sir.  I  believe  that  if  gentlemen  will 
adopt  the  tariff  bill  now  under  consideration,  extended  as 


FARMERS,    MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION.     335 

is  its  free  list  and  great  as  are  the  reductions  in  rates  of 
duties,  we  can  take  the  internal  taxes  off  all  but  eight 
articles  by  a  law  of  this  session,  and  go  still  further  in  that 
direction  during  the  next  session. 

Mr.  Stevenson.     What  articles  are  they  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  will  come  to  that  in  the  course  of  my 
remarks.  I  have  a  note  of  them.  While  on  this  subject 
let  me  say  that  I  believe  further,  that  in  the  interest  of  the 
farmers  of  the  country  we  should  hasten  the  day  when  we 
can  take  the  tax  off  distilled  spirits. 

Sir,  the  West  has  grain  for  which  she  can  find  no  mar 
ket.  The  Governments  of  Great  Britain  and  France, 
cooperating  with  our  internal  tax  system,  deprive  them  of 
what  would  be  a  generous  market.  Take  the  tax  of  65 
cents  a  gallon  off  whisky,  and  the  grain  now  stored  in  the 
granaries  of  the  West  would  be  distilled  into  alcohol  and 
shipped  to  the  countries  of  South  America,  the  West  India 
Islands,  Turkey,  and  elsewhere.*  I  have  now  answered 
the  gentleman  as  far  as  I  propose  to  at  present.  I  have, 
however,  not  yet  done  with  him. 

Mr.  Stevenson.  The  gentleman  is  criticising  what  was 
drawn  out  of  me  by  a  question  from  himself.  I  ask  him 
in  fairness  to  permit  me  to  put  a  question  to  him. 

Mr.  Kelley.     Well,  go  on. 

Mr.  Stevenson.  I  want  to  know  whether  the  gentleman 
is  not  in  favor,  before  reducing  the  tariff  on  coal  and  iron, 
of  taking  the  internal  revenue  tax  off  whisky  and  abolish- 
ing  the  tax  on  incomes  entirely  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  am  in  favor  of  abolishing  at  the  earliest 
possible  day  a  system  that  makes  inquisition  into  the 
private  affairs  of  every  man  and  woman  in  the  country, 
and  has  cost  us  for  the  three  last  years  an  average  of 
§8,509,532  77  per  annum,  and  taken  probably  10,000  per 
sons  from  industrial  employments  and  fastened  them  as 
vampires  upon  the  people.  This  is  what  I  am  in  favor  of 
But  I  hold  the  floor  for  another  purpose  than  a  mere  con 
troversy  with  the  gentleman. 

Mr.  Stevenson.  Then  the  gentleman  declines  to  answer 
my  question. 

*  The  tax  on  spirits  not  only  restricts  the  market  for  grain,  but  taxes  the 
farmer  by  the  addition  it  makes  to  the  cost  of  many  articles  he  consumes.  It 
adds  about  15  cents  to  the  cost  of  producing  an  "unce  of  ouinine,  and  more  largely 
to  the  cost  of  chloroform,  collodion,  and  many  other  d~rugs,  and  almost  every 
variety  of  perfumery.  Before  it  was  imposed,  we  exported  such  articles  to  many 
countries.  Now  we  import  them  largely. 


336     FARMERS,    MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION. 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  have  answered  the  gentleman's  question, 
and  every  gentleman  present  will,  I  think,  say  I  have 
answered  it  frankly. 

FREE   TRADE   MEANS    LOW   WAGES   AND    A   LIMITED   MAR 
KET   FOR    GRAIN. 

Mr.  Chairman,  I  am  not  specially  familiar  with  the  gen- 
Jeman's  district.  Though  I  have  visited  Cincinnati  several 
times  and  ridden  through  Hamilton  county,  I  have  but 
few  acquaintances  within  their  limits;  yet  I  know  some 
thing  about  them.  The  last  annual  report  of  the  Cincin 
nati  Board  of  Trade  informs  us  that  during  the  year  ending 
March  31,  1869,  there  were  produced  in  the  gentleman's 
district  and  the  adjoining  one,  in  about  3000  separate 
establishments,  187  distinct  classes  of  manufactured  articles, 
of  an  aggregate  value  of  $104,657,612.  The  cash  capital 
invested  in  these  establishments,  the  report  says,  is  $49,- 
824,124,  and  they  give  employment  to  55,275  hands. 

Mr.  Chairman,  I  venture  the  remark  that  there  is  not 
among  these  55,275  working  people  one  who  will  indorse 
the  opinions  advanced  by  the  gentleman. 

Mr.  Stevenson.  Will  the  gentleman  yield  to  me  for  a 
moment  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.     No,  sir;  I  must  decline. 
Mr.  Stevenson.     The  gentleman  holds  the  floor  without 
restriction  by  the  courtesy  of  the  House. 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  will  yield  further  to  the  gentleman  during 
the  course  of  my  remarks,  but  not  at  present. 

Many  of  the  laboring  people  of  his  district  are  immi 
grants  and  know  how  small  are  the  wages  of  workmen 
on  the  other  side  of  the  Atlantic,  and  the  fare  on  which 
they  live.  They  know  that  free  trade  means  low  wages. 
Buy  labor  where  you  can  buy  it  cheapest  is  the  cardinal 
maxim  of  the  free  trader.  More  than  85  per  cent,  of  the 
cost  of  every  ton  of  coal,  salt,  and  pig-iron  is  in  the  wages 
of  labor,  and  when  the  gentleman  shall  have  stricken  the 
duties  off  these  articles,  the  1,500,000  people  who  are  now 
earning  good  wages  in  their  production  must  compete  with 
the  cheap  labor  of  Turk's  Island,  England,  Wales,  and 
Germany.  Thrown  out  of  remunerative  employment  in 
the  trades  to  which  they  have  devoted  their  lives,  as  they 
will  be,  they  must  compete  with  workmen  in  other  pur 
suits,  even  though  they  glut  the  market  and  bring  down 
the  general  rate  of  wages  throughout  the  land.  He  who 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.    NEED    PROTECTION7".      337 

advocates  protective  duties  pleads  the  cause  of  the  Ameri 
can  laborer.  I  will  not  amplify  this  proposition.  I  regard 
it  as  a  truism,  and  beg  leave  to  illustrate  it  by  inviting  the 
attention  of  my  colleague  from  Iowa,  [Mr.  Allison,]  and 
the  gentleman  from  Ohio,  to  a  statement  of  the  wages  and 
subsistence  of  families  of  laborers  in  Europe,  on  page  179 
of  the  monthly  report  of  the  Deputy  Special  Commissioner 
of  the  Kevenue,  No.  4  of  the  series  1869-70.  It  refers 
specialty  to  Germany,  and  was  translated  and  compiled 
from  Nos.  10-12  of  the  publications  of  theEoyal  Prussian 
Statistical  Bureau,  Berlin,  1868. 

This  paper,  gentlemen  will  remark,  was  not  prepared 
for  or  by  American  politicians,  or  by  a  faithless  officer  of 
this  Government,  or  by  any  representative  of  a  free  trade 
or  protective  league.  Its  facts  are  most  significant. 

The  wheat-growers  of  Iowa  and  the  West  are  suffering 
from  the  want  of  a  market  for  their  grain.  Too  large  a 
proportion  of  our  people  are  raising  wheat.  We  want 
more  miners,  railroad  men,  and  mechanics,  and  our  present 
rates  of  wages  are  inducing  them  to  come  to  us.  Nearly 
half  a  million  people  tempted  by  these  wages  will  come 
this  year.  Our  working  people  are  free  consumers  of 
wheat,  beef,  pork,  and  mutton.  But  could  they  be,  under 
free  trade  or  reduced  duties  ?  These  articles  are  luxuries 
rarely  enjoyed  by  the  working  people  of  England  or  the 
continent,  with  whom  anti-protectionists  would  compel 
them  to  compete.  The  official  paper  to  which  I  refer  tells 
us  that  "  rye  and  potatoes  form  the  chief  food  of  the  labor 
ing  classes  ;  that  the  wives  and  daughters  of  brick-makers, 
coal  and  iron  miners,  and  furnace  and  rolling-mill  men 
aid  them  in  their  rough  employments  ;  that  the  regular 
wages  of  workingmen  average  in  summer  and  winter  from 
16T%  to  24  cents  per  day,  and  those  of  females  from  8J  to 
14J  cents  per  day  ;  that  miners  at  tunneling  are  sometimes 
paid  as  much  as  72  cents  (1  thaler)  per  day,  and  that  a 
brick-maker,  aided  by  his  wife,  averages  80  cents  per  day  ; 
that  wages  for  female  labor  are  more  uniform,  and  that  18 
cents  per  day  can  be  earned  by  a  skillful  hand  ;  that 
juvenile  laborers  in  factories  begin  with  48  cents  per  week 
for  ten  hours  daily,  and  rise  to  72  cents  per  week ;  that 
the  general  average  of  daily  wages  is  as  follows :  males, 
for  twelve  hours'  work  per  day  in  the  country,  19  J  cents; 
in  cities  24  cents;  and  that  the  wages  of  master- workmen, 
overseers,  etc.,  are  at  least  $172  per  year."  That  gentle- 
22 


338      FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION. 

men   and   their   constituents   may  study  this   instructive 
paper  I  beg  leave  to  submit  it  to  the  reporters  entire. 

Wages  and  subsistence,  of  families  of  laborers  in  Europe. 

GEKMANY. 

Lower  Silesia,  translated  and  compiled  from  No.  10-12  of  the  pu 
blications  of  the  Koyal  Prussian  Statistical  Bureau,  Berlin,  1868. 

The  regular  wages  of  workingmen  average  in  summer  and  winter 
from  16.8  cents  to  24  cents  (gold)  per  day ;  of  females,  from  08.4  to 
L4.4  cents  per  day,  more  nearly  approaching  the  higher  rate.  Dur 
ing  the  short  winter  days  workingmen  receive  for  8  hours'  labor 
from  10  to  14.4  cents ;  the  females,  7.2  cents  ;  while  in  summer,  for 
12  to  13  hours'  labor  the  relative  wages  are  from  19.2  to  28.8  cents, 
and  from  ]4.4  to  19-2  cents,  respectively.  The  wages  of  those 
working  in  the  royal  forests  are  so  regulated  as  to  average  24  cents 
per  day  for  males,  and  14.4  cents  per  day  for  females ;  in  some 
mountain  countries  the  latter  receive  but  12  cents. 

In  larger  cities  wages  rise  above  these  rates,  especially  for  skilled 
labor.  Men  working  on  railroads  receive  in  summer  from  28.8  to 
36  cents  per  day ;  and  women  from  16.8  to  26.4  cents.  In  the  larger 
cities  ordinary  female  help  in  housekeeping  is  paid  from  24  to  26.4 
cents. 

Work  done  by  the  piece  or  by  contract  is  paid  about  one-third 
more  than  the  customary  wages.  A  common  laborer  expects  in 
contract  work  from  36  to  48  cents ;  at  railroad  work  even  more. 

When  work  is  scarce  the  wages  often  fall  to  about  16.8  cents  per 
day  for  males,  arid  9.6  cents  for  females. 

Labor  is  often  paid  by  the  hour,  at  from  01.4  to  3  cents  for  males, 
and  0.4  to  2  cents  for  females ;  2.4  cents  per  hour  are  the  wages  of 
an  able  field  laborer  in  the  mountains. 

During  the  summer  especially,  opportunities  for  work  are  offered 
to  children,  who  receive  from  6.11  to  7.2  cents  per  day,  and  in  win 
ter  about  4.8  cents. 

Wherever  the  work  rises  above  mere  manual  labor  in  a  trade  or 
factory,  the  daily  wages  of  men  are  from  30  to  48  cents,  and  often 
rise  to  60  cents.  Miners  at  tunneling  are  frequently  paid  72  cents 
(1  thaler) ;  in  the  district  of  Gorlitz,  a  brick-maker  aided  by  his 
wife,  averages  80  cents  per  day ;  *  in  the  district  of  Fauer  from 
$5  76  to  $7  20  per  week.  Skilled  workmen  of  large  experience  re 
ceive  from  $360  to  $432  per  annum.  The  wages  of  the  molders  and 

*•  To  compete  with  this  "  cheap  and  nasty"  system  England  employs  women, 
children  and  infants  to  make  her  bricks.  '*  IN  OUR  BRICK-FIELDS  AND  BRICK 
YARDS,  THERE  ARE  FROM  TWENTY  TO  THIRTY  THOUSAND  CHILDREN — FROM  AS  LOW 
AS  3  AND  4  UP  TO  16  AND  17 — UNDERGOING  A  BONDAGE  OF  TOIL  AND  A  HORROR  OF 

EVIL  TRAINING  THAT  CARRIES  PERIL  IN  IT." — The  Cry  of  the  Children  from  the 
Brick-yards  of  England.     By  George  Smith.     London  :    1871,  p.  7. 

"But  there  are  often  phases  of  evil  connected  with  work  in  brick-yards  and 
clay-yards,  generally,  which  I  must  not  overlook,  especially  the  demoralizing 
results  ever  accruing  from  the  mixed  employment  of  the  sexes.  A  flippancy 
and  familiarity  of  manners  with  boys  and  men,  grows  daily  on  the  young  girls. 
Then,  the  want  of  respect  and  delicacy  toward  females  exhibits  itself  in  every 
act,  word,  and  look ;  for  the  lads  grow  so  precocious,  and  the  girls  so  coarse  in 
their  language  and  manners  from  close  companionship  at  work,  that  in  most 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.      339 

enamelers  in  iron  founderies,  of  the  locksmiths  and  joiners  in  ma 
chine-works,  in  piano  factories,  amount  to  from  72  cents  to  $1  08 
per  day ;  the  same  in  manufactories  of  glass,  silverware,  watches, 
and  hat  factories.  The  highest  wages  paid  to  a  very  skillful  joiner 
in  a  pianoforte  factory  were  $12  24  per  week. 

Wages  for  female  labor  are  more  uniform  throughout;  18  cents 
per  day  can  be  earned  by  a  skillful  hand,  24  cents  per  day  very 
rarely. 

Juvenile  laborers  in  factories  begin  with  wages  of  48  cents  per 
week,  for  10  hours'  work  daily,  and  rise  to  72  cents  per  week.  The 
law  prohibits  the  employment  of  children  under  12  years  of  age; 
from  12  to  14  years  it  permits  6  hours',  and  from  14  to  16  years,  10 
hours'  daily  labor. 

The  general  average  of  daily  wages  is  as  follows :  Males,  for  12 
hours'  work  per  day,  in  the  country,  19.2  cents ;  in  cities  24  cents ; 
harder  labor,  30  cents  ;  in  cities,  36  cents ;  skilled  labor,  60  cents. 

The  wages  of  master  workmen,  overseers,  &c.,  are  not  included  in 
the  above  average,  but  are  at  least  $172  per  annum. 

In  regard  to  the  time  of  work,  laborers  in  factories  are  employed 
11  to  12  hours  per  day,  (exclusive  of  time  for  meals ;)  where  work 
is  continued  day  and  night,  the  hours  for  the  day  are  from  6  to  12 
a.  m..  and  1  to  7  p.  m. ;  for  the  night,  from  7  p.  m.  to  6  a.  in.,  with 
£  hour  recess ;  in  a  few  districts  10  hours  constitute  a  day's  work. 
In  many  cloth  factories  and  wool  spinneries,  males  and  females 
work  12  to  13  hours,  and  some  even  16  hours  per  day.  As  an  ex 
ample,  a  cloth  factory  employs  firemen  and  machinists  16  hours, 
spinners  and  dyers  14  hours,  all  others  12  hours,  exclusive  of  time 
for  meals.  In  glass-works,  the  nature  of  the  work  requires  from 
16  to  18  hours  for  melters,  13  to  15  hours  for  blowers ;  but  then  one 
party  rests  while  the  other  works.  Eye  and  potatoes  form  the  chief 
food  of  the  laboring  classes. 

Savings. 

Although  but  few  workingmen  can  save  any  portion  of  their  earn 
ings,  still  there  are  some  who  purchase  a  little  piece  of  land,  a  house, 
or  a  cow,  and  the  latest  accounts  from  fifteen  districts  in  Lower 


cases,  the  modesty  of  female  life  gradually  becomes  a  byeword  instead  of  a 
reality,  and  they  sing  unblushingly  before  all,  whilst  at  work,  the  lewdc-st  and 
most  disgusting  songs,  till  oftentimes  stopped  short  by  the  entrance  of  the 
master  or  foreman.  The  overtime  work  is  still  more  objectionable  becauee  boys 
and  girls,  men  and  women,  are  less  under  the  watchful  eye  of  the  master,  nor 
looked  upon  by  the  eye  of  day.  All  these  things,  the  criminality,  levity,  coarse 
phrases,  sinful  oaths,  lewd  gestures,  and  conduct  of  the  adults  and  youths, 
exercise  a  terrible  influence  for  evil  on  the  young  children.  Hence  a  generation 
full  of  evil  phrases,  manners,  and  thoughts  is  daily  growing  up  in  our  midst 
without  the  knowledge  of  better  things.  It  is  quite  common  for  girls  employed 
in  brick-yards  to  have  illegitimate  children.  Of  the  thousands  whom  I  have 
met  with,  or  know  as  working,  I  should  say  that  one  in  every  four  who  had  ar 
rived  at  the  age  of  twenty  had  had  an  illegitimate  child.  Several  had  hud  three 
or  four,  and  it  is  a  deplorable  fact  that  as  a  rule  brick  manufacturers  do  not 
trouble  themselves  to  inquire  into  the  moral  character  of  either  women  or 
children,  when  they  employ  them.  I  have  found  myself  often  looked  upon  as 
an  oddity  when  I  have  asked,  'is  she  of  good  character?'  and  have  been  sub 
jected  to  sharp  criticism  when  I  have  discharged  a  single  woman,  because  she 
Was  palpably  enceinte."  — A.  Brickmaster,  quoted  by  Gco.  Smith,  p.  22. 


34:0      FAKMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 

Silesia  show  deposits  in  savings-banks,  from  house  servants  of  $428,- 
455 ;  of  apprentices  arid  mechanical  workmen  of  $124,522.  No 
statistics  of  savings  of  factory  workers  were  obtained.  In  some 
factories  the  workmen  have  established  savings-banks,  some  of  which 
have  deposits  of  from  $8000  to  $10,000. 

DETAILED  STATEMENTS  OF  THE  WAGES  AND  COST  OF  LIVING  IN  DIFFERENT 
DISTRICTS  OF  LOWER  SILESIA. 

1.  District    of   Bolkenhain. 

The  annual  expenses  of  a  family  of  about  5  persons,  (3  children,) 
belonging  to  the  working  class,  were  as  follows : 

Provisions,  (per  day,  0.144  to  0.168,)  per  year $60  00 

Kent,  (8  thalers,) 5  76 

Fuel 3  60 

Clothing,  linen,  etc 14  40 

Furniture,  tools,  etc 7  20 

Taxes  :  State  0.72;  church  12;  commune  36,  $1  20 

School  for  2  children 2  50 

3  70 

Total , $94  66 

The  expenses  of  a  laborer's  family  being  24  to  26.4  cents  per  day, 
the  earnings  should  be  28  to  30.8  cents  per  day,  which  the  head  of 
the  family  cannot  earn.  While  his  earnings  are  from  17  to  19  cents, 
the  wife  earns  8  to  10  cents,  and  the  children  must  help  as  soon  as 
old  enough.  Miners  in  this  district  have  24  to  29  cents  daily  wages  ; 
factory  men  from  19  to  29  cents ;  mechanics  receive  48  to  54  cents 
per  week,  besides  board  ;  male  house  servants  $17  to  $30,  and  female 
$12  per  annum,  exclusive  of  board  and  lodging. 

2.  District  of  Landeshut. 
Expenses  of  a  family : 

In  the  country.  In  a  city. 

Kent  per  annum $5  76  $10  72 

Provisions,  (per  week,  90  cents,) 

per  annum 46  80*  56  10 

Fuel  and  light  per  annum 14  40  16  42 

Taxes,  etc.,  per  annnm 3  60  4  32 

Clothing,  etc.,  per  annum 856  1000 

Other  expenses  per  annum 7  20  8  57 


Total $86  32  $106  13 

The  income  of  laborers'  (weavers')  families  does  generally  not 
reach  these  amounts.  Many  are  permitted  to  gather  their  wood 
from  the  royal  forests,  and  spend  little  for  clothing,  which  they  beg 
from  charitable  neighbors.  A  weaver  earns  here  from  48  to  72 
cents,  $1.  and  $1  50  per  week ;  most  weavers  have  2  looms  in  opera 
tion,  and  together  with  their  wives  earn  from  $1  50  to  $2  16  per 
week.  The  average  earnings  of  weavers  are  given  at  96  cents  per 
week,  or  about  $50  per  annum. 


*   Per  week,  $1 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.      341  ^ 

3.  District  of  Hirscliberg. 

The  lowest  cost  of  living  for  a  laborer's  family  is  given  at  $64  80 
to  $72  per  annum,  of  which  are  expended  for  provisions  $43  30,  for 
clothing  $17,  taxes  $3  16.  fuel  $3  60,  rent  $4,  etc.  In  the  summer 
the  wages  for  12  hours'  daily  work,  for  males,  are  from  15  to  39 
cents ;  for  females  5  to  17  cents  per  day ;  in  winter  from  3  to  7  cents 
less.  A  male  farm  hand  receives  $12  to  $22  per  year ;  a  boy  $9  to 
$14;  a  maid-servant  $12  to  $18  per  annum,  with  board. 

The  annual  expenses  of  a  laborer's  family,  living  in  a  comfortable 
manner,  without  luxuries,  would  be  nearly  double  the  amount  actu 
ally  expended  above. 

The  following  is  an  estimate  : 

Rent,  (one  room,  alcove,  and  bed-room,) $  8  64 

Fuel  and  light 14  40 

Provisions,  (breakfast,  coffee ;  at  noon,  pota 
toes,  dumpling — 10  cents ;  evening,  bread,  a 
little  brandy — 5  cents ;  supper,  soup,  bread, 

vegetables — 6  cents,) 75  00 

Clothing,  (husband  $6  48,  wife  $5  76,  children 

$1  20  ;  soap  72  cents,) 20  16 

Taxes,  etc 2  16 

Schooling  of  children,  (21  cents  per  week  per 

child,) 3  60 

School  books 72 

To  lay  by  for  sickness,  etc 8  58 

Unforeseen  expenses 8  58 

Total $141  84 

4.  District  of  Sclwnau. 

The  ordinary  yearly  wages,  in  addition  to  board,  paid  to  servants 
in  this  rural  district,  were  as  follows  :  Man-servant,  $14  40  to  $21  60 ; 
boys,  $8  64  to  $12  96  ;  maid-servants,  $8  64  to  $17  28 ;  children's 
nurses,  $5  76  to  $12  96. 

During  the  harvest  the  daily  wages  for  14  hours'  work  are  as  fol 
lows :  Mowers,  from  19.2  to  28.8  cents;  laborers,  (males,)  from  19.2 
to  24  cents ;  females,  from  14.4  to  17  cents. 

In  other  seasons  males  receive  for  10  hours'  daily  labor  from  14.4 
to  19.2  cents,  and  females  12  to  14.4  cents  per  day;  and  in  winter 
males  receive  12  cents,  and  females  7.4  to  9.6  cents.  A  laborer  in 
the  cities  receives  24  to  28.8  cents  per  day ;  the  "  fellows  "  (journey 
men)  of  trades  receive  from  60  cents  to  $1  20  per  week,  and  board. 

A  laborer's  family  of  5  persons  requires  for  its  subsistence  during 
the  year  the  following  amount :  For  provisions,  $72  to  $85  72  ;  rent 
of  1  room  and  3  bedrooms,  $4  32;  clothing,  etc.,  $10  80;  fuel,  etc., 
$3  60 ;  taxes,  etc.,  $3  60.  Total  $108  04. 

5.  District  of  Goldberg. 

The  cost  of  living  of  a  laborer's  family,  (husband,  wife,  and  two 
children.)  in  this  district  is  thus  given:  Provisions,  $75  60;  rent, 
$4  32;  fuel,  $7  20;  clothing,  $10  02:  furniture,  tools,  etc.,  72  cents; 
taxes,  etc.,  $2  28.  Total,  $100  14.  In  less  expensive  times  provi 
sions  have  been  estimated  at  $20  less. 


342       FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,  NEED    PROTECTION. 


In  the  rural  portion  men  receive  21.6  cents,  women  14.4  cents  for 
a  day's  work ;  this  average  includes  higher  wages  for  skilled  labor. 

On  a  farm  a  man-servant  receives  $17  20  per  year,  in  addition  to 
board,  etc.,  which  may  be  estimated  at  $43  20 ;  a  maid-servant  re 
ceives  $14  40,  besides  board. 

Laborers  in  stone-quarries  earn  from  24  to  43.2  cents  per  day  ;  in 
cloth  factories  1.8  to  2.2  cents  per  hour,  while  the  daily  wages  of 
carpenters  are  from  33.6  to  38.4  cents;  masons,  33.6  to  45.6  cents  ; 
roof-slaters,  33.6  to  45.6. 

Shoemakers  and  tailors  receive  from  9  to  10  cents,  besides  their 
board  arid  lodging,  which  is  valued  at  12  cents. 

6.  District  of  Lowenberg. 

The  yearly  expenses  of  a  family  with  3  children  are  estimated  at 

from  $93  60  to  $108,  namely  :                     in  city.  in  country. 

Rent $10  60  $  4  32 

Provisions,  ($1  20  per  week,) 62  40  55  72 

Fuel  and  light 12  66  10  80 

Taxes,  school,  etc 3  60  360 

Clothing,  etc 12  85  12  85 

Other  expenses 576  576 

Total , $107  87  $93  05 

Wages  are  as  follows  : 

Men,  day  laborers,  from  14.4  to  28.8  cents  per  day;  women  12  to 
18  cents  per  day  ;  men,  with  board,  9.6  to  14.4  cents  per  day  ;  women, 
with  board,  7.2  to  12  cents  per  day.  From  10  to  14  hours  constitute 
a  day's  labor ;  more  hours,  and  harder  work  secure  higher  wages. 

Male  servants  per  year,  $14  40  to  $36,  and  board;  female  per 
year,  $8  57  to  $21  60,  and  board. 

Journeymen  in  trades  obtain  the  following : 


Wages  per  week  (with  board 
and  lodgiug). 

In  cities. 

In  the  country. 

Mini 
mum. 

Maxi 
mum. 

Mini 
mum. 

Maxi 
mum. 

Cents. 

54 
54 
54 
54 
54 

Cents. 
72 
72 

60 

72 

72 

Cents. 

42 

42 
42 
30 
42 

Cents. 

72 
72 
72 
60 

72 

\Vh  eel  wrisrhts 

7.   City  of  Greifenberg. 

The  subsistence  of  a  workingman's  family,  consisting  of  5 — man, 
wife,  and  3  children — is  thus  given : 

Income. 
A  mason  receives  33.6  cents  per  day,  regular 

work,  32  weeks  in  a  year $64  52 

Weaving  or  other  work,  4  months,  at  48  to  60 

cents  per  week,  say 8  00 

Yearly  earnings  of  wife 720 


Total $79  72 


FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,    NEED   PROTECTION.   343 

A  day  laborer  receives  24 cents  per  day,  or  $1  44 

per  week,  regular  work  40  weeks $57  60 

During  the  rest  of  the  year  he  and  his  wife  may 

earn.. 1440 


Total $72  00 

A  carpenter  earns  a  little  more  than  a  mason,  his  chances  for 
winter  labor  being  better.  A  weaver,  working  at  home,  makes  less 
than  the  day  laborer;  those  in  the  factory  earn  per  year  $72. 

Expenses  of  a  family. 

Eent,  $8  64;  clothing.  $1440,  (shoes  being  a  large  item;)  light, 
$1  44;  fuel,  $5  04;  repairing  tools,  72  cents  ;  taxes,  $1  44  ;  school 
for  three  children,  $1  44.  Total,  $33  12. 

Provisions. — The  meals  consist  of  patatoes  and  bread,  their 
means  not  being  sufficient  to  allow  meat ;  potatoes,  20  bushels, 
$10  08;  bread,  (6  cents  per  day,)  $21  90;  coffee,  (chiccory  4  pounds 
per  day,)  $2  88;  butter,  (£•  pound  per  week,)  lard,  herring,  salt,  (24 
cents  per  week.)  $12  48.  Total,  $47  26.  Aggregate  expenses,  $80  38. 

Note. — If  the  work  is  not  regular,  the  demands  of  the  family 
must  be  curtailed,  and  suffering  often  takes  place. 

8.  District  of  Gorlitz. 

Here  the  condition  of  the  laborer  appears  more  comfortable, 
since  work  can  be  found  throughout  the  year. 

Masons  and  carpenters  earn  36  to  43.4  cents  per  day ;  railroad 
laborers,  26.4  to  28.8 ;  field  laborers,  21.6  to  28.8  and  females  14.5 
to  24  cents. 

The  lowest  expenses  for  a  family  consisting  of  4  or  5  persons  are 
thus  computed : 

Provisions $57  60  to 

Rent,  lights,  and  fuel 11  52  to 

Clothing 13  57  to 

Tools,  etc 1  44  to 

School 1  44  to 

Taxes  .,  72  to 


Total $86  29  to  $132  02 

By  careful  inquiries  it  has  been  reliably  ascertained  that  a  family 

can  earn  from  $93  60  to  $144  a  year,  so  that  some  lay  up  small 

savings. 

For  the  city  of  Gorlitz  the  average  income  of  a  laborer's  family 

is  estimated  at  $95  to  $144  a  year;  the  expenses  for  4  or  5  persons, 

from  $115  to  $172  80.  namely  : 

Rent,  light,  and  fuel.. $22  72  to    $32  15 

Clothing,  etc 14  40  to       21  60 

Tools,  furniture,  etc 1  44  to        5  76 

School 4  32  to        504 

Provisions 72  00  to     10825 


Total $114  88  to  $172  80 


344      FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED    PROTECTION. 

9.  District  of  Glogau. 

Farm  laborers'  income : 

Males — 6  weeks  in  harvest,  at  30  cents  per  day. ...$10  80 

14  weeks,  (sowing  and  haymaking.)  at  24 

cents  per  day 20  16 

15  weeks,  fall  arid  spring,  at  18  cents  per 

day 16  20 

15  weeks,  winter,  at  14.4  per  day 12  96 

Total,  50  weeks $60  12 

Females — 6  weeks,  at  12  cents  per  day  (5 

days  per  week) $3  60 

14  weeks,  at  9.6  cents  per  day 6  72 

15  weeks,  at  8.4  per  day 6  30 

15  weeks,  at  7.2  per  day 5  40 

22  02 

Total,  50  weeks $82  14 

\    Expenses  of  a  family  with  3  children : 

16  sheffels*  rye,  at  $1  32 $21  12 

sheffels  wheat,  at  $1  80 3  60 

2  sheffels  barley,  at  $1  20 2  40 

2  sheffels  peas,  at  $1  44 2  88 

2  sheffels  millet,  at  $1  44 2  88 

24  bags  potatoes,  at  38.4  cents 922 

52  pounds  butter,  at  19.2  cents 9  98 

18  quarts  milk,  at  24  cents 4  40 

Meat,  (2  quarters  mutton,  $3  60,  1  pig,  $10  80)  14  40 

52  pounds  salt,  at  .024 1  25 

Rent,  $5  76,  light,  $1  52 7  28 

Fuel,  (wood,  $9  72,  coal,  $3  18) 12  90 

Clothing 18  72 

Taxes,  and  other  expenses 8  00 


Total $119  03 

As,  according  to  these  statistics  a  man  and  wife  can  earn  but 
$82  14  per  year,  a  deficiency  of  $36  89  must  be  made  up  by  the 
work  of  the  children  or  by  extra  labor  in  the  summer,  especially  at 
harvest  time. 

15.  District  of  Leignitz. 
Expenses  of  a  family  with  three  children : 
Provisions — 

Bread,  1  pound  flour  per  head  daily $26  52 

Potatoes,  £  bag  or  75  pounds  per  week,  at  18 

cents." 9  36 

Barley,  2  sheffels,  at  96  cents 0  96 

Peas,  1  sheffel,  at  $1  08 1  08 

Butter,  1  to  If  pound  per  week,  71^  pounds  per 

year,  at  19  cents 13  73 

Carried  over $51  65 

*  1  sheffel  equals  1'56  bushel,  United  States. 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION.       345 


Brought  over $51  65 

Milk,  4  quarts  daily,  at  4  cents 5  84 

Meat,  1  swine  for  fattening,  or  1  pound  per  week     5  56 

Salt,  1  pound  per  week,  at  2.4  cents 1  25 

Coffee,  chiccory,  sugar 4  32 

Wheat  flour  for  cake  on  holidays 1  32 

Beer 90 

Rent,  for  a  room,  a  garret-room  and  small  space, 

per  annum 7  20 

Light,  oil  for  26  to  39  weeks,  j  to  f  pound  at  6 

cents 2  34 

Fuel,  during  6  winter  months  20  cents,  summer 

10  cents  per  week 8  00 

Clothing — 

Husband  :  2  shirts,  at  72  cents $1  44 

1  pair  boots 2  88 

Pantaloons,  (3  pairs  in  2  years)       72 
Coat,  etc 72 


Wife  :          2  chemises $1  44 

1  pair  shoes 1  20 

Dress,  etc 2  64 

Children :  2  shirts,  at  36  cents  each.  2  16 

3  pairs  shoes 2  16 

Clothing 2  16 


Soap  for  washing 

18  72 

Tools,  for  repair  of. 143 

Taxes — income,  72  cents  ;  communal,  .384  cents  ; 

school,  including  books,$2.556 3  60 


Total  expenses $112  13 

Income  of  a  family  with  two  children : 

Husband  averages  305  days,  at  21.6  cents $65  88 

Wife  averages  250  days,  at  10.4  cents 26  00 

Oldest  child  averages  60  days,  at  7.2  cents 4  32 

Every  married  workman  receives  : 

1  sheffel  wheat $1  80 

2  sheffels  rye 2  16 

2  sheffels  barley 1  92 

1  sheffel  peas 1  08 

6  96 

He  can  raise  on  a  patch  of  land  10  bags  pota 
toes,  valued  at 2  88 

And  glean  at  harvest  3  sheffels  of  rye  or  barley  3  06 

For  extra  work  through  the  year 8  64 

For  a  fat  pig 5  76 

Total  income $123  50 

In  the  city  of  Leignitz  the  average  expense  of  a  laborer's  family 
is  estimated  at  $141  84  per  year. 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION. 


TABLE  SHOWING  THE  KATES  OF  WAGES  PAID  FOB  FACTORY  AND 
OTHER  LABOR  IN  LOWER  SILESIA  DURING  THE  YEAR  1868. 

[Rates  expressed  in  cents,  (gold,}  United  States.] 


T 

rages  per  day. 

Branches  and  occupations. 

Males. 

Females. 

Children. 

Bleaching  presses  : 

18  to  36 

14}  to  18 

27  to  33 

36  to  42 

48  to  60 

24  to  36 

Brickyards  : 
Ordinary  work    ...       .  .        . 

20  to  24 

29  to  39 

Chamotte-moulders    

33  to  48 

Contract  work 

36  to  60 

14  to  20 

10  to  17 

Average  summer  wages  
Cane  factories  : 

24  to  42 
36  to  66 

16  to  18 

10  to  18 

36  to  60 

Joiners    

48 

Laborers    

28  to  42 

Chemical  works  : 
Average  wa^es    ...    

3H 

OJ-2 

24  to  36 

8  to  15 

4  to  6 

Cigar  factories  : 

44 

16  to  18 

6  to  10 

$1  to  $2 

24  to  40 

Box-makers  

12 

18  to  24 

Boilers  

24  to  72 

.Assorters    ...     ...        ..... 

72  to  $1  08 

36  to  48 

Foremen  

$1  50 

18  to  36 

Dyeing  establishments  : 

20  to  54 

14  to  18 

Fullers  

24 

15 

Shearers  

29  to  36 

Foremen  

$1  08 

Earthenware,  etc.  : 
Pottery  molders 

60  to  72 

24  to  60 

14  to  22 

Stoneware,  ordinary  work  
Turners  

18  to  24 
24  to  48 

.... 

Painters  

24  to  42 

Porcelain,  glazing  makers  
Burners  

30  to  36 

30  to  42 

18  to  24 

.... 

Gilders  ., 

36  to  42 

12  to  18 

FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION.       84:7 


TABLE.— Continued. 


Wages  per  day. 

Males. 

Females. 

Children. 

Earthenware,  etc.  : 
Potter-turners  

48 

Foremen  

96 

Glass-works,  polishers  

10  to  24 

Melters  

60 

Painters  and  gilders  . 

40  to  72 

18  to  36 

Skilled  hands  

60  to  96 

•  «  •  • 

Bottle-makers  

48  to  60 

Ordinary  hands  

24  to  36 

12  to  18 

12 

Flour  mills  : 
Laborers  

22  to  29 

Assistant  millers  

36  to  60 

Firemen  

24  to  29 

Machinists  

33 

72 

Gas-works,  laborers  

24  to  36 

Hatters  : 
Ordinary  hands  

48  to  $1 

24  to  36 

Skilled  hands  

$1  66  to  $2 

Iron-works  : 

18  to  28 

Locksmiths  

24  to  60 

Machine-builders  

60  to  $1  08 

Molders  

42  to  72 

12  to  20 

Turners  

52 

Machinists  

40  to  72 

Foremen  

72 

48 

Enamelers  ...            ... 

36  to  72 

60  to  72 

Lime  kilns  : 

20  to  30 

24  to  36 

Mining  : 
Ordinary  labor  

18  to  24 

12 

16  to  20 

Miners  

48  to  60 

36 

Oil  refiners  

18  to  42 

16 

Paper  mills  : 

21  to  48 

10  to  24 

8  to  16 

Cutters  

24 

30 

36  to  50 

Machinists    

36 

32  to  58 

... 

42  to  48 

12  to  24 

Railroad-car  shop  : 

40  to  72 

Locksmiths.. 

36  to  96 

343       FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION. 
TABLE.—  Continued. 


• 

images  per  day. 

Males. 

Females. 

Children. 

Railroad-car  shop  : 

42  to  $1  08 

*    Screw-cutters  ....               ... 

30  to  60 

42  to  60 

File-cutters  ....        ...      . 

48  to  72 

48  to  96 

Carpenters  

42  to  66 

48  to  66 

Upholsterers  

36  to  60 

34 

Starch  factories  

18  to  36 

12  to  17 

36 

Silversmiths  

60  to  84 

24  to  60 

12  to  15 

Watch-factory  workmen  .... 
Saw-mills  : 

24  to  72 
26  to  48 

15 

Machinists  

36  to  60 

48 

24  to  42 

12  to  30 

12  to  24 

cotton  ....        .        . 

20  to  42 

12  to  18 

9  to  12 

1  8  to  48 

14  to  24 

6  to  18 

Suo-ar  Refiners  

14  to  36 

9  to  15 

36  to  60 

12  to  15 

Toy  factories  : 

18  to  36 

10  to  24 

Turners    ...    ....  .... 

36  to  48 

Sculptors... 

36  to  SI  08 

The  wages  of  journeymen  in  the  following  trades,  including  board 
and  lodging,  are  as  follows  : 

Per  Week. 

Bakers $0  92 

Butchers 0  72 

Smiths 1  08 

Tinners 2  52 

Wheelwrights 2  16 

Furriers 2  16 

Saddlers 0  72 

Locksmiths 2  52 

Tailors , 2  52 

Shoemakers 1  44 

Fresco-painters 3  42 

Cabinet-makers 2  88  to  3  60 

Cloth-weavers 1  44  to  2  16 

From  the  reports  of  the  chambers  of  commerce  of  Germany  the 
following  labor  statistics  are  collected  : 

In  the  coal  mines  of  Rhenish-Prussia,  average 
daily  wages  of  3661  laborers,  with  families 
of  8572  persons,  males $0  64 


FARMERS,   MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED    PROTECTION.       349 

Iron  foundery,  (Duisburg,)  average  wages  per  day  : 

Founders $0  65  to  $0  72 

Other  skilled  workmen 0  54 

Laborers 0  43 

Machinists  and  locksmiths 0  58 

In  two  iron  founderies,  same  district,  average 

daily  wages,  respectively 0  58  to    0  65 

Iron-bridge  establishment 0  55 

Safe  factory,  average  yearly  earnings 182  80 

Zinc  establishments,   average  wages,   first-class 

hands 0  94 

Second-class  hands 0  72 

Other  laborers 0  53 

Cotton  factories,   average  wages  per  hand,  in 
cluding  children 0  41 

Cotton  spinning,  average  wages  per  hand  (mostly 

young  persons) 0  36 

Average  weekly  wages  paid  in  the  coal  mines  of  Plauen,  Saxony : 

To  miners $3  10 

To  laborers 1  98 

To  boys 0  40 


[From  report  of  Chamber  of  Commerce  uf  Chemnitz  for  1868.] 

SAXONY. 

TABLE — Showing  the  average  WeeMy  Wages  of  Labor  paid  inthe  district  ofrf>pmnifz,$aa-ony, 
in  the  respective  Tears  1860  and  1864  to  1868.  Hates  expressed  in  United  States  g<>ld 
values. 


TRADES. 

MALES. 

FEMALES  OR 

J)  CHILDREN. 

I860. 

1864. 

1865.    1866. 

1867. 

1868. 

I860. 

1864. 

1865.  ,  1866. 

1867. 

1868. 

Accordeon-makers  
Artificial-flower  makers.... 
Bakers  

$2.16 

1.08 
1.17 
1.80 

$3.60 

1.44 
72 

2.52 

$2.52 
2.40 
2.16 
48 
1.92 
3.60 
2.16 

2.88 

2.52 
2.40 
3.12 
72 
2.88 
3.24 
2.33 
2.16 
2.88 
2.52 
2.16 
2.70 
2.52 
2.16 
2.52 
2.40 
72 
3.24 
2.88 
2.88 
3.24 
1.44 
1.44 

$2.52 
2.40 
2.16 
48 
1.92 
3.60 
2.88 

2.88 
2.40 

2.88 
3.24 
2.33 
2.16 
2.88 
2.52 
2.16 
2.79 
2.52 
2.16 
2.52 
2.40 
72 
3.24 
2.88 
2.88 
3.24 
1.44 
1.44 

$2.52 
2.52 
2.52 
1.44 
2.16 
3.60 
2.88 

2.88 

2.64 

"72 
2.88 
3.60 
2.33 
2.88 
2.88 
2.88 
2.16 
2.88 
3.24 
2.16 
2.88 
2.40 
72 
3.24 
3.12 
2.88 

l'.44 

1.80 

$2.52 
2.52 
2.88 
1.44 
2.16 
3.60 
3.24 

4.32 

2.88 
2.88 
4.56 
72 
2.88 
3.60 
2.88 
2.88 
2.88 
2.88 
2.16 
3.24 
3.24 
2.40 
2.88 
2.40 
72 
3.24 
3.60 
2.88 
3.60 
1.44 
1.80 

$1.08 

$1.08 
1.08 

$0.96 
87 

$0.96 
87 

$0.96 
87 

$0.96 
87 

Barbers             

... 

... 

3.24 
1.08 

2.28 
2.04 
2.52 
1.80 
2.52 
2.52 
1.92 
1.08 
2.88 
2.16 
2.16 
2.64 
3.24 
2.78 
2.16 
1.62 
1.92 
2.37 
2.04 
1.80 
3.24 
1.08 
2.16 

3.60 
1.44 

2.52 
2.52 
3.24 
2.16 
2.52 
2.52 
2.52 
1.20 
3.24 
3.72 
2.88 
2.76 
3.24 
2.78 
2.16 
1.98 
1.92 
2.37 
2.40 
2.52 
2.16 
1.20 
2.88 

1.20 
1.08 

1.44 
1.44 

Belt-makers,    work-  ) 
ers  in  bronze,      /  "" 

1.44 

1.44 

1.44 

1.44 

Bookbinders 

... 

Butchers 

1.08 

Button-makers  

1.08 
68 

1.20 
1.20 

1.08 

1.08 

1.08 

Card  (playing)  makers  
Card  (carding)  makers  

1.20 
2.16 

L20 
90 

1.44 
1.08 

1.08 
72 

1.08 
72 

1.20 
48 

Chair-framers  

Chemical  manufacturers... 

72 

"90 

72 

96 

... 

... 

Cloth-finishers  

1.08 
72 

198 

84 

*s 

*S 

196 

84 

1.44 

1.62 

J48 

{58 

Comb-makers  

Confectioners  

.. 

350        FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 
TABLE—  Continued. 


TRADES. 

MALES. 

FEMALES  OR  J)  CHILDREN. 

I860. 

2.40 
2.16 
4.32 
2.88 
1.68 
3.18 
1.44 
3.96 
2.16 
1.92 
1.56 
1.80 
1.08 
2.16 
2  52 

1364. 

2.88 
2.88 
5.04 
2.88 
1.92 
3.18 
1.80 
2.88 
2.88 
2.16 
1.80 
2.16 
1.26 
2.88 
3  60 

186S. 

3.60 

2.88 
4.32 

1866. 

1867.    1868. 

I860. 

1S64. 

1865. 

1866.    1867. 

1868. 

3.60 
5.04 

3.60   3.60 
...      3.60 
5.04   5.04 

1.08 

1.20 

1.08 

1.80 

Crockery  ware  artists  
Crockeryware  workmen.,. 

2.04 
1.44 

2.88 
3.60 
2.88 
2.16 
2.42 
1.44 
2.64 
2.88 
2  88 

2.07 
1.44 

2.88 
3.60 
2.88 
2.16 
2.42 
1.44 
2.64 
2.88 

2.16 
1.44 

2.88 
3.60 
2.88 
2.16 

1.44 

2.88 
2.12 

2.34 
1.44 

2.88 
3.60 
2.88 
2.40 
3.60 
1.44 
2.88 
2.96 
1.44 
3.24 
1.68 

... 

Distillers                     .    . 

Dyers  of  silk  and  wool  

::: 

... 

... 

,,      ?                 

... 

1.08 

Glass-workers  

"96 

1.02 

1.08 

1.08 

1.08 

Goldsmiths 

2.16 
1.68 
2.16 

2.52 

3.24 

2.16 
1.20 

1.08 

3.12 
2.40 
2.16 
2.34 

2.16 

3.60 
3.24 
2.88 
1.44 
2.52 
1.20 
2.52 
3.96 

3.24 
1.68 
2.16 
96 

2.88 

3.12 

2.88 
2.16 
2.40 
96 
2.88 
4.12 

3.24 

3.24 

Hatters  

2.16 
96 

3.12 

2.8S 
2.16 
2.40 
96 
2.88 

2.52 
1.08 

3.17 
360 
2.]  6 
2.40 
1.08 
3.60 

2.52 
1.08 

3.12 
4.32 
3.24 
4.32 
2.40 
2.40 
1.08 
4.32 
4.32 

Iron  arid  steel  workers  : 
Iron-founders  •] 

}... 

... 

... 

... 

Machine-  builders  
Locksmiths 

;;; 

Nailmakers  
Blacksiniths  

... 

... 

... 

... 

Lithographers  

3.96 

Loom-builders  
Millers  

2.16 
2.05 

2.88 
2.15 

2.52 
1.92 

2.52 
1.92 

2  62 
1.92 

1.92 

1.26 

1.44 

1.44 

1.44 

1.80 

1.44 

Milliners  

Mining: 

4.32 

4.68 
2  52 

5.04 

4.68 
2'52 

Miners 

... 

Day  laborers  

2.30 
2.16 
1.80 
2.16 

3.60 
1.06 
1.08 
84 
2.16 
1.80 
1.20 
1.20 
1.80 

3.96 

2.16 
3.36 
1.98 
1.20 
1.08 
96 
2.52 
1.08 
2.16 

2.50 
3.60 
1.92 
2.88 

3.60 
1.04 
1.08 
96 
2.52 
•1.80 
1.44 
1.44 
2.12 

3.96 

2.64 
3.36 
2.16 
1.68 
1.20 
1-08 
2.88 
1.08 
2.52 

*72 
2.04 
2.40 

3.24 

72 
96 
96 
2.52 
1.92 
1.68 
2.88 
2.52 

3.96 

2.64 
5.76 
2.16 

2.88 
1.08 
96 
2.40 
2.16 
2.28 
1.44 
2.16 
2.16 
2.52 

72 
2.16 
2.40 

3.24 

"96 
96 

2.70 
1.92 
1.68 

2.88 
2.52 

216 
2.88 
1.08 
96 
2.40 
2.16 
2.40 
1.68 
2.16 
2.16 
2.52 

... 

96 

2.28 
2.40 

3.60 

"96 
96 

2.88 
1.92 
1.68 
2.88 

6.48 
2.16 
2.88 
1.08 
1.08 
2.40 
2.40 
252 

96 

2.40 
2.40 

3.60 
96 
96 
96 

2.88 
1.92 
1.68 
2.88 
2.88 

5.04 

3.60 

7.20 
2.16 
2.88 
1.44 
1.08 
2.40 
2.88 
2.88 
1.68 
2.16 
2.40 
388 

Oil-cloth  makers 

Potters 

Printers  : 

... 

t*24 

... 

fao 

Saddlers  

Saw-mill  laborers  
Slaters  

... 

... 

... 

... 

::: 

... 

... 

... 

Stocking-weavers  (ma-  ) 
chine)                       J  "' 

... 

... 

... 

::: 

Stone  quarrymen  

Tailors 

••• 

... 

... 

Tanners  

Tapestry-makers   

... 

... 

Wheelwrights     ... 

1.68 
2.16 
2.40 
?,  70 

60 

48 

48 

48 

60 

60 

Wire-cloth  makers  
Weavers  (silk) 

2.52 
2.16 

2.88 

2.88 
2.16 
3.24 

1*08 

1.08 

l"o8 

l"o8 

l"o8 

l'«0 

Wool  combers...., 

351 


My  colleague  [Mr.  Townsend]  hands  me  a  letter  con 
taining  a  statement  of  American  wages  in  some  of  the 
same  branches  of  labor.  That  gentleman  may  contrast 
them  with  the  wages  of  Germany,  as  set  forth  by  the 
Statistical  Bureau  of  Prussia,  I  will  also  hand  the  letter 
to  the  reporters : 

PHCENIXVILLE,  PENNSYLVANIA,  March  21,  1870. 
Dear  Sir :  Your  favor  of  the  16th  is  before  me. 
Below  I  give  you  the  prices  paid  per  day  to  our  principal  work 
men,  as  follows : 

Rolling-mill  on  rails  and  beams. 


Per  day. 

Heaters $4  50 

Helpers 1  70 

Extra  helpers 1  60 

Finishing  rollerman 6  75 

Roughing  rollerman 2  70 

Catchers 2  25 

Hooks 1  80 

Hot  straighteners 2  50 

Cold  straighteners 3  60 

Stochers 2  35 

Filers 1  50 

Laborers 1  50 

Engineers 2  10 

Merchant  iron. 

Heaters 4  37 

Helpers 1  70 

Extra  helpers 1  60 

Finishing  roller 4  05 

Roughing  roller 2  12 

Catchers 1  60 

Roughing  catcher 1  30 

Straightener... 1  90 

Engineers 2  80 


Bar  mill. 

Per  day. 

Heaters $3  87 

Helpers 1  70 

Rollers 2  12 

Catchers 1  55 

Hooks 1  60 

Heavy  merchant  iron. 

Heaters 4  37 

Helpers 1  70 

Finishing  roller 5  00 

Roughers 2  35 

Catchers 1  50 

Straightener 1  50 

Mauler 1  50 

Engineer 1  90 

Puddling. 

Puddler 3  00 

Puddler's  helpers 2  00 

Labor. 

Common  labor.... 1  40 


I  am  unable  to  give  the  wages  paid  for  the  above  classes  of  work 
either  in  England,  France,  or  Belgium,  but  I  am  satisfied  from  the 
prices,  as  we  have  had  them  from  time  to  time  from  these,  that  their 
present  pay  is  not  over  an  average  of  40  per  cent,  of  above. 

Respectfully,  JOHN    GRIFFIN, 

General  Superintendent. 

HON.  WASHINGTON  TOWNSEND. 


Mr.  Allison. 
question  ? 
Mr.  Kelky. 


Will  the   gentleman    yield  to  me  for  a 
Yes.  sir. 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 

Mr.  Allison.  I  will  ask  the  gentleman  whether  that  is 
not  a  report  of  wages  paid  by  a  company  that  manufac 
tures  what  are  known  as  iron  beams  for  vessels  and 
bridges  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.  They  manufacture  beams,  rails,  and  other 
heavy  forms  of  iron. 

Mr.  Allison.  And  is  it  not  a  company  which  with  three 
others  has  agreed  upon  an  established  list  of  prices  for 
that  class  of  articles,  which  prices  embrace  the  prices 
abroad,  together  with  the  tariff  duty  and  a  profit  on  the 
cost  of  manufacture  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  cannot  answer  the  question,  because  I 
do  not  know.  I  can,  however,  say  that  I  have  never 
heard  such  an  allegation.  But,  my  dear  sir,  I  do  not  care 
what  they  have  agreed  to  do,  if  they  are  thereby  enabling 
American  workingmen  to  keep  their  children  at  school, 
well  fed  and  comfortably  clad,  to  maintain  their  seats  in 
church,  and  to  lay  by  something  for  old  age  and  a  rainy 
day,  and  not  compelling  them,  as  German  workmen  in 
like  employments  are  compelled  to  do,  to  take  their  wives 
and  daughters  as  colaborers  into  iron  and  coal  mines  and 
furnaces  and  rolling-mills,  so  that  they  may  together  earn 
enough  to  eke  out  a  miserable  subsistence. 

Mr.  Allison.  I  do  not  take  issue  with  the  gentleman 
upon  that  question,  but  merely  desire  to  call  his  attention 
to  the  fact  that  this  is  one  of  four  establishments  that  have 
a  monopoly  in  this  business. 

Mr.  Kelley.  A  monopoly  !  A  workman  a  monopolist ! 
A  poor  workman  for  wages  a  monopolist !  A  man  who 
is  earning  daily  wages  by  hard  work  in  a  mine,  a  furnace, 
or  a  rolling-mill  will  hardly  be  regarded  as  a  monopolist, 
though  his  pay  may  be  ten  times  what  he  could  get  in  his 
native  town.  No,  sir;  such  men  are  not  monopolists, 
though  free  traders  constantly  denounce  them  as  such. 

CINCINNATI — HER  WORKSHOPS   AND   WORKMEN. 

Mr.  Chairman,  90  per  cent,  of  the  cost  of  iron  in  all  its 
forms  is  the  wages  of  labor,  and  the  money  paid  for  this 
labor  goes  very  largely  to  pay  for  wheat  and  pork  and 
mutton  and  beef  that  are  eaten,  and  woolen  clothes  that 
are  worn  by  the  workmen  and  their  families.  The  wages 
of  well-paid  laborers  thus  find  their  way  to  the  pockets  of 
the  farmer  and  the  wool-grower. 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.       353 

Mr.  Stevenson.  Will  the  gentleman  yield  to  me  now  for 
a  question  ? 

Mr.  Kelley*     Yes,  sir. 

Mr.  Stevenson.  It  seems  that  the  gentleman  has  just 
discovered  that  there  are  some  manufacturers  in  Cincin 
nati.  I  want  to  know  whether  he  has  not  also  discovered 
that  more  than  half  of  the  capital  and  labor  and  produc 
tion  of  those  manufactories  are  in  the  articles  of  wood, 
iron,  leather,  and  paper,  upon  which  I  want  the  duties  re 
duced,  and  whether  it  is  not  to  the  interest  of  those  pro 
ducers  to  have  cheap  raw  material  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.  It  is  the  interest  of  the  working  people  of 
Cincinnati  that  the  general  rate  of  wages  shall  be  main 
tained  at  the  highest  point.  It  is  not  for  the  interest  of 
any  mechanical  producer  in  this  country  to  have  the 
duties  on  his  productions,  or  others  which  involve  much 
labor,  so  reduced  that  the  cheap  labor  of  France,  Belgium, 
Germany,  and  Britain  can  come  in  competition  with  them 
in  our  home  market.  And  thus  I  fully  answer  the  gentle- 
man's  question. 

The  gentleman  is  mistaken.  I  have  not  just  discovered 
that  there  are  manufactories  in  Cincinnati,  for  as  I  heard 
the  gentleman  pleading  for  a  law  which  would  inevitably 
check  their  prosperity  and  progress  and  reduce  the  wages 
of  labor  I  thought  of  old  Charles  Cist,  and  wondered 
whether  his  bones  were  not  rattling  in  his  coffin.  From 
almost  the  birth  of  Cincinnati  he  was  a  champion  of  pro 
tection,  and  did  more  than  any  other  man  to  build  up  her 
workshops  and  manufactories,  and  more  than  twenty  years 
ago  devoted  a  day  to  conducting  me  through  many  of  the 
largest  of  them. 

But  I  want  to  allude  further  to  the  remarks  of  the  gen 
tleman  from  Ohio  [Mr.  Stevenson].  Speaking  of  Pennsyl 
vania,  he  said : 

"  Ah  !  she  is  shrewd  !  New  PJngland  heretofore  has  had  the  repu 
tation  of  great  adroitness  in  taking  care  of  her  own  interest,  but 
Pennsylvania  carries  off  the  palm.  Quietly  she  sits  looking  out  for 
herself,  we  giving  bounty,  she  appropriating  it.  And  now,  what  is 
the  result  ?  If  we  suppose,  for  the  sake  of  argument,  that  the  tariff 
on  iron  and  coal  is  added  to  the  cost,  then  Pennsylvania  received  a 
premium  on  her  production  of  iron  and  coal  in  1868  of  $14,859,168." 

Has  the  gentleman  a  settled  opinion  on  the  question,  Is 

a  protective  duty  a  tax  or  bounty  ?     Or  is  he,  like  Bunsby, 

unable  to  give  an  opinion  for  want  of  premises  on  which 

to  base  it?      "If  so  be,"  said  Bunsby,  on  a  memorable 

23 


354:       FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION. 

occasion,  "as  he's  dead,  my  opinion  is  lie  won't  come  back 
no  more ;  if  so  be  as  he's  alive,  my  opinion  is  he  will.  Do 
I  say  he  will  ?  No.  Why  not  ?  Because  the  bearings 
of  this  obserwation  lays  in  the  application  on  it."  [Laugh 
ter.]  "  If  we  suppose  for  the  sake  of  argument."  A 
teacher  of  political  economy  that  has  not  yet  made  up  his 
mind  whether  a  protecting  duty  is  a  tax  or  not  comes  here 
and  arraigns  Pennsylvania,  and  holds  her  up  to  ridicule  as 
a  cormorant  fattening  upon  public  bounty  or  plunder. 
But  let  me  go  on. 

Mr.  Stevenson.  Will  the  gentleman  give  us  his  opinion 
upon  that  subject  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.     I  have  given  it,  and  will  give  it  again. 

PROTECTIVE    DUTIES   NOT   A  TAX. 

Mr.  Chairman,  I  apprehended  that  no  enlightened  stu 
dent  of  political  economy  regards  a  protective  duty  as  a 
tax.*  Even  the  gentleman  from  Iowa  [Mr.  Allison]  admit 
ted  that  in  most  cases  it  is  not ;  yet  influenced,  as  I  think, 
by  a  clever  story  which  the  chairman  of  our  committee, 
who  is  somewhat  of  a  wag,  tells,  he  does  not  think  the 
principle  applies  to  pig-iron.  I  hope  our  chairman,  who 
I  see  does  me  the  honor  to  listen,  will  pardon  me  for  re 
ferring  to  the  anecdote.  It  runs  thus :  Some  years  ago, 
during  the  days  of  the  Whig  party,  when  the  chairman 
of  the  committee  [Mr.  Schenck]  was  here  as  a  Eepresenta- 
tive  of  that  party  and  a  friend  of  protection,  he  met  as  a 
member  of  this  House  a  worthy  old  German  from  Bead 
ing,  Pennsylvania,  a  staunch  Democrat,  but  strongly  in 
favor  of  protection  on  iron.  The  gentleman  from  Ohio, 

*  In  a  country  whose  resources,  embracing  every  known  mineral  substance,  are 
undeveloped,  and  which,  though  capable  of  producing  boundless*  supplies  of 
silk,  cotton,  flax,  and  wool,  depends  on  foreigners  for  a  large  part  of  the  fabrics 
in  which  to  clothe  its  people,  the  question  whether  a  protective  duty  is  a  tax 
touches  but  one  and  that  a  subordinate  aspect  of  the  problem  a  statesman  must 
consider.  This  is  well  put  by  Dr.  Bushnell  in  his  recent  article  in  Scribner's 
Monthly.  He  says  : 

"  How  then  is  it  that  free-trade  science  is  going,  as  we  hear,  to  settle  perempto 
rily  all  the  great  questions  of  public  economy  ?  For  if  we  set  ourselves  down  to 
it  as  the  test  of  economy,  and  say  it  is  final,  we  are  by  and  by  obliged  to  a#k, 
is  there  nothing  to  be  done  or  thought  of  in  the  world  that  is  out  of  economy, 
and  rightly  spurns  it  ?  May  not  the  worst  economy  sometimes  be  the  best  ?  To 
be  fostering  modes  of  production,  where  the  trade-scale  balance  shows  only  dis 
advantage,  wears  a  bad  look  certainly,  as  respects  the  matter  of  economy.  But 
how  many  and  vast  supplies  ore  wanted  that  must  not  be  left  to  the  uncertainties  <>j 
trade;  where  to  higgle  over  the  expense  would  be  even  a  contemptible  tocaknex*  ? 
This  is  true  in  particular  of  all  the  supplies  that  are  needed  for  the  equipment 
of  the  state  of  public  war.  Without  these  no  people  is  a  proper  nation,  or  at 
least  by  any  possibility  a  strong  one.  Therefore  these  we  must  not  only  have, 
but  must  have  the  tcay  of  making  ourselves,  at  any  cost." 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION.     355 

who  is  fond  of  a  joke,  said  to  him  one  day,  "Mr.  E.,  I 
think  I  shall  go  with  the  free-traders  on  the  iron  sections 
of  the  tariff  bill,  especially  on  pig-iron."  "  Why  will  you 
do  that  ?  "  was  the  response.  "  Well,  my  people  want 
cheap  plows,  nails,  horseshoes,  etc."  "  But,"  replied  the 
old  German,  "  we  make  iron  in  Pennsylvania ;  and  if  you 
want  to  keep  up  the  supply  and  keep  the  price  down  you 
ought  to  encourage  the  manufacture."  "  But  you  know," 
said  our  chairman,  "  that  a  protective  duty  is  a  tax,  and 
adds  just  that  much  to  the  cost  of  the  article."  "  Yes,  I 
suppose  it  does  generally  increase  the  cost  of  the  thing 
just  so  much  as  the  duty  is;  all  the  leaders  of  our  party 
say  so,  and  we  say  so  in  our  convention  platforms  and  our 
public  meeting  resolutions ;  but,  Mr.  Schenck,  somehow 
or  other  I  think  it  don't  work  just  that  way  mit  pig-iron." 
[Laughter.] 

The  gentleman,  while  admitting  that  protective  duties 
do  not  always,  or  even  generally,  increase  the  price  of  the 
manufactured  article,  thinks  "  that  somehow  or  other  it  don't 
work  that  way  mit  pig-iron."  Now,  I  think  that  iron  in 
all  its  forms  is  subject  to  every  general  law,  and  that  the 
duty  of  $9  per  ton  on  pig-dron  has  reduced  the  price  mea 
sured  in  wheat,  wool,  and  other  agricultural  commodities, 
and  increased  the  supply  to  such  an  extent  as  to  prove 
that  the  duty  has  been  a  boon  and  not  a  tax.  On  nothing 
else  produced  in  this  country  has  the  influence  of  protec 
tion  been  so  broadly  and  beneficently  felt  by  the  people 
of  the  country  at  large. 

On  the  llth  of  January  I  submitted  to  the  House  some 
remarks  in  the  nature  of  a  review  of  the  last  report  of  Com 
missioner  D.  A.  Wells,  and  showed  that  after  the  produc 
tion,  of  American  pig-iron  had  been  without  increase  for  a 
decade,  under  the  stimulus  of  this  duty  we  more  than  dou 
bled  it  in  six  years.  The  authentic  figures  I  exhibited 
were  as  follows: 

Production  of  pig-iron  in  England  and  the  United  States  from  1854 
to  1862,  inclusive. 

England.  United  States. 

1854 3,069,838  716,674 

1855 3,218,154  754,178 

1856 3,586,377  874,428 

1857 3,659,447  798,157 

1858 3,456,064  705,094 

1859 3,712,904  840,427 

1860 3,826,752  913,774 

1861 3,712,390  731,564 

1862 3,943,469  787,662 


856      FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION. 

The  Morrill  tariff',  which  raised  the  duty  to  $6,  went 
into  effect  in  1861.  In  1864  the  duty  was  raised  to  $9. 
The  results  have  been  as  follows : 

England.  United  States. 

1863 4,510,040  947,604 

1864 4,767,951  1,135,497 

1865 4,819,254  931,582 

1866 4,523,897  1,350,943 

1867 4,761,028  1,461,626 

1868 1,603.000 

1869 1,900,000 

In  connection  with  these  figures  I  then  invited  the  at 
tention  of  the  House  to  the  fact  that  we  built  last  year 
sixty-five  furnaces  in  fifteen  States  of  the  Union,  and  that 
fifty-eight  more  had  been  begun.  A  few  years  more  of 
such  wonderful  progress  and  we  will  produce  from  our 
own  coal  and  iron  our  entire  supply  of  iron  and  steel,  and 
compete  with  England  in  supplying  the  demands  of  the 
world.  The  vast  demand  created  by  the  extension  of  our 
railroad  system,  and  those  of  Russia  and  India,  are  exceed 
ing  the  capacity  of  England.  She  cannot  largely  increase 
her  production  without  largely  increasing  its  cost.  The 
gentleman  from  Iowa  was  yesterday  constrained  to  admit 
that  the  price  of  English  iron  has  gone  up  steadily  during 
the  last  year,  because  the  demand  is  in  excess  of  her  capa 
city  to  produce ;  yet  the  price  of  American  pig-iron  has 
fallen  at  least  $6  per  ton  on  all  grades  within  the  last  ten 
months.  What  is  the  cause  of  this  reduction  ?  Not  Bri 
tish  competition — and  that  is  the  only  possible  foreign  com 
petition — for  the  price  of  British  iron  has  risen.  No,  sir ; 
the  price  of  American  iron  has  gone  down  under  domestic 
competition  and  the  general  depreciation  of  prices.  Keep 
your  duty  high  enough  to  induce  other  men  to  build  fur 
naces  and  rolling-mills,  and  before  five  years  you  will  find 
American  iron  cheapened  to  the  level  of  the  markets  of 
the  world,  and  that  without  a  reduction  of  wages,  but  pro 
bably  with  an  advance 

HOW  THE  INTERNAL  REVENUE  CAN  BE  DISPENSED  WITH. 

But  I  return  to  my  subject.  The  gentleman  from  Ohio 
asked  from  what  eight  sources  $130,000,000  of  revenue 
can  be  derived.  I  find  I  overstated  the  number  required ; 
but  six  articles  are  necessary  to  give  us  all  the  income  we 
need  this  year  from  internal  taxes.  Let  me  state  the  re- 


357 

ceipts  from  these  six  sources  during  the  last  year.     They 
were  as  follows : 

From  distilled  spirits $45,026,401 

From  tobacco 23,430,709 

From  fermented  liquors .'...       6,099,879 

From  banks  and  bankers 3,335,516 

From  incomes 34,791,855 

From  stamps 16,420,710 


$129,104,068 

Sir,  month  by  month,  since  the  close  of  the  last  fiscal 
year,  the  receipts  from  each  of  these  sources  have  been 
larger  than  those  of  the  corresponding  month  of  last  year. 
There  is  a  regular  monthly  increase  in  every  item.  Ke- 
taining  but  these  six  sources  of  internal  revenue  we  can 
mitigate  their  exactions  at  least  by  increasing  the  exemp 
tion  from  the  income  tax  or  reducing  the  rate,  and  still 
obtain  an  excess  over  the  amount  that  is  absolutely  re 
quired.  I  am  in  favor  of  adopting  this  course,  and  believe 
that  in  three  years  more,  or  in,  at  most,  five  years,  we  can 
wipe  out  all  our  internal  taxes  except  stamps  and  tobacco. 

Mr.  Schenck.     And  spirits. 

Mr.  Kelley.  No.  I  am  anxious  to  make  spirits  free  as 
soon  as  we  can.  I  would  make  this  change  in  the  inter 
ests  of  the  farmers  of  the  country.  But  I  do  not  wish  to 
run  into  a  digression,  and  will  recur  to  this  point.  I  pro 
ceed  to  invite  the  attention  of  the  committee  to  the  cost 
of  collecting  the  internal  revenue.  In  1867  it  was  $8,982,- 
686;  in  1868,  $9,327,301;  and  in  1869,  $7,218,610,  requi 
ring  for  the  three  years  the  expenditure  of  $25,528,597. 
Why,  sir,  its  abolition  would  be  equal  to  the  payment  of 
$133,000,000  of  the  public  debt.  We  hope  to  fund  our 
interest- bearing  debt  at  an  average  of  4J  per  cent.  This 
will  save  $18,000,000.  Before  the  end  of  this  fiscal  year 
there  will  be  in  the  Treasury  $100,000,000  of  our  bonds, 
the  interest  on  which  is  $6,000,000  per  annum,  which, 
with  the  other  sum  and  the  cost  of  collecting  the  internal 
revenue,  would  make  a  reduction  of  $32,500,000  in  the 
annual  expenses  of  the  Government.  If  the  bill  under 
discussion  shall  become  a  law  we  will,  I  believe,  although 
it  lightens  the  burdens  of  the  people  at  least  $20,000,000 
per  annum,  be  able  in  five  years  to  make  even  distilled 
spirits  free,  and  rely  on  stamps  and  the  tax  on  tobacco. 


858      FAKMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED    PROTECTION. 
THE   EFFECT   OF    PROTECTION   ON   PRICES   AGAIN. 

The  gentleman  from  Iowa  said  that  pig-iron  sells  at  $40 
a  ton,  and  yields  at  least  $15  profit.  I  have  The  Iron  Age, 
a  paper  of  the  highest  authority  among  dealers  in  iron  and 
hardware,  and  I  do  not  find  it  puts  it  at  the  price  named 
by  the  gentleman.  March  12  it  quotes  prices  at  Philadel 
phia  of  American  pig-iron,  No.  1,  for  foundery  use,  as 
$33  50  to  $34;  No.  2,  foundery,  $31  50  to  $32;  gray 
forge,  $30  to  $31 ;  white  and  mottled,  $28  50  to  $29. 
There  is  some  difference  between  these  prices  and  $40; 
and  if  the  gentleman  was  as  far  out  of  the  way  in  the 
profits  of  iron-makers  as  in  the  current  price  of  iron  he  has 
sbown  clearly  enough  that  there  is  no  profit  in  making 
pig-iron  at  this  time.  The  gentleman  from  Ohio  [Mr. 
Garfield]  hands  me  a  still  later  paper,  showing  a  further 
reduction.  But  every  business  man  knows  that  the  price 
is  receding  under  the  rapid  increase  of  domestic  competi 
tion. 

The  English  people  know  what  would  be  the  effect  of 
the  reduction  of  our  duty.  I  hold  in  my  hand  the  annual 
circular  of  a  leading  iron  firm  in  London  advising  the 
English  iron-makers  of  the  state  of  the  trade,  and  the 
prospect  for  this  year.  Let  me  read  from  this  circular, 
which,  I  may  remark,  was  evidently  not  intended  for 
American  consumption : 

"No.  58  OLD  BROAD  STREET, 

"LONDON,  December  31,  1869. 

"  SIR  :  This  has  been  a  prosperous  year  for  the  iron-masters.  Our 
monthly  advice  of  exports  will  have  revealed  the  cause.  Three 
countries  alone — Russia,  India,  and  the  United  States — have  pur 
chased  940,000  tons  of  British  rails.  Under  these  unprecedented 
exports  the  price  has  ruled  firm,  and  good  Erie  rails  are  now  worth 
£6  15s.  net. 

"  Coal  and  pig-iron. — Over-production  has  kept  down  the  price  ; 
but  at  length  the  demand  for  pigs  appears  to  have  overtaken  the 
supply,  and  they  are  firm  at  an  advance  of  5s.  upon  the  year. 

"Old  rails  have  been  largely  used  by  rail-mills,  and  have  advanced 
10s.  also  during  the  year. 

"  Wages  have  advanced  over  the  whole  mining  district.  At  a 
meeting  in  London  this  week  the  Welsh  iron-masters  voted  an  ad 
vance  of  10  per  cent. 

"  Cost  of  the  finished  rails  to  the  manufacturer  is  thus  settled. 
The  buyer  is,  however,  more  interested  in  the  relation  of  supply  to 
demand. 

"  The  supply  of  railway  bars  has  greatly  increased  ;  many  mer 
chant  bar-mills  have  taken  to  rails,  and  all  the  mills  have  increased 
their  make.  This  increased  product  has,  however,  found  ready  sale, 
and  will  not  probably  decrease. 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION.      359 

"  The  demand  for  next  year  promises  to  be  good.  Most  of  the 
mills  have  orders  for  three,  and  some  for  six  months.  Home  rail 
ways  must  buy  more  largely  than  in  1869.  India  will  also  take 
more  rails.  Russia  is  not  so  eager  a  buyer  as  at  this  time  last  year. 
The  Government,  however,  continues  to  build  roads  for  commercial 
and  military  purposes,  and  while  the  English  investors  retain  their 
present  partiality  for  Russian  securities  there  will  be  no  lack  of 
money.  Yet  with  the  present  out-turn  a  material  reduction  of  the 
American  duty,  or  something  equally  significant,  is  necessary  to  ad 
vance  the  price  above  £7." 

Yes,  Mr.  Chairman,  a  material  reduction  of  the  Ameri 
can  duty,  or  something  equally  significant,  is  necessary  to 
enable  the  British  iron-master  to  advance  his  price  beyond 
£7 ;  and  the  day  the  telegraph  announces  that  we  have 
reduced  our  duty  on  pig  and  railroad  iron  will  be  the  day 
on  which  the  price  of  British  iron  will  go  up.  I  pray  gen- 
tlemen  to  be  admonished  by  this  circular. 

I  have  also  an  article  from  the  Manchester  Examiner 
and  Times  of  January  3,  1870,  relating  to  cotton,  as  com 
pared  with  the  year  preceding  ;  and  from  what  I  shall  read 
it  will  be  seen  that  iron  is  not  the  only  English  interest 
which  will  be  improved  by  the  reduction  of  our  duties. 
The  organ  of  the  cotton-spinners  of  Manchester  says : 

•'  As  compared  with  the  years  preceding  the  American  war,  this 
country  has  received  during  the  past  few  years  £7,000.000  to  £8,- 
000.000  less  per  annum  for  the  cost  of  manufacturing  cotton,  and 
there  can  be  no  'question  that  in  comparison  with  the  cost  of  cotton 
this  country  has  marketed  the  cheapest  cloth  ever  made ;  and  if 
cotton  manufacturers  on  the  continent  of  Europe  had  not  been  pro 
tected  by  high  tariffs  they  would  have  been  swept  from  the  field" 

Yes,  say  the  Examiner  and  Times  of  Manchester  and 
the  free-trade  league,  repeal  the  protective  duties  on  cot 
ton,  wnich  are  so  abhorrent  to  the  gentleman  from  Iowa, 
and  the  cotton  manufactures  of  the  country  will  be  swept 
from  the  field. 

THE    TARIFFS    OF    ENGLAND    AND    FRANCE    DISCRIMINAT 
AGAINST  AMERICAN  FARMERS. 

The  gentleman  from  New  York  [Mr.  Brooks]  held  up 
the  English  tariff  to  our  view.  Some  may  have  been  sur 
prised  to  hear  me  say  that  I  was  very  anxious  to  hasten 
the  day  when  the  tax  on  distilled  spirits  should  be  re 
pealed.  But  gentlemen  from  the  agricultural  districts,  do 
you  know  that  France  and  England  discriminate  specially 
against  you  and  your  constituents  in  their  tariffs,  and  that 


360      FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 

England  derives  nearly  half  her  customs  from  inordinate 
duties  on  the  productions  of  the  American  farmer,  or  from 
agricultural  products  with  which  this  country  could  sup 
ply  her  ?  Let  us  look  at  the  facts.  The  gentleman  from 
New  York  holding  up  the  tariff  of  England,  said  it  yields 
£21,602,414  sterling,  or  $108,000,000 ;  but  he  did  not  in 
vite  your  attention  to  the  fact  that  she  raises  over  $54,- 
000,000,  or  more  than  one  half,  by  duties  that  discriminate 
against  our  farmers.  Yet  such  is  the  case.  She  raises 
from  tobacco  and  snuff,  one  of  our  leading  agricultural 
staples  and  its  immediate  product,  £6,542,460,  or  $32,- 
712,300.  The  friends  of  free  trade  say  we  do  not  import 
enough  English  iron ;  we  do  not  import  enough  English 
cotton  goods ;  we  do  not  import  enough  English  woolen 
goods,  considering  how  cheap  we  can  buy  them  all.  If 
we  are  to  reduce  our  duties  and  import  more  I  beg  the 
Representatives  of  the  farming  States  of  the  West  to  de 
mand  something  like  reciprocity  on  behalf  of  their  con 
stituents,  for  whose  grain  there  will  be  no  market.  Every 
yard  of  cotton  and  woolen  goods  and  every  ton  of  iron  re 
present  the  grain  and  meat  consumed  by  the  families  of  the 
men  who  produce  it ;  and  while  our  grain  goes  to  waste  for 
the  want  of  purchasers,  the  friends  of  protection  protest 
against  importing  that  grown  in  other  countries,  even 
when  converted  into  cloth  or  iron.  The  cloth  and  iron 
would  be  as  good  if  made  where  well-paid  laborers  eat 
freely  of  American  wheat,  butter,  and  meat ;  and  to  those 
who  cannot  sell  their  crop  at  any  price  a  neighboring 
furnace,  factory,  or  rolling-mill  would  be  a  blessing,  even 
though  they  could  not  buy  cloth  or  iron  at  English  prices.* 
But  I  must  proceed.  • 


*  Those  only  who  know  how  large  a  number  of  horses,  mules,  and  oxen  are  re 
quired  to  haul  the  ore,  coal,  and  limestone,  from  the  ore  bed,  mine  and  quarry  to 
the  furnace  and  the  pig-iron  thence  to  the  point  of  shipment  or  use,  and  how 
many  men  are  required  to  produce  a  thousand  tons  of  pig-iron,  can  form  an  idea 
of  the  market  for  corn,  oats,  hay,  straw,  wheat,  vegetables,  and  animal  food,  the 
development  of  the  Marquette  mines  has  created.  How  rapid  this  has  been 
under  a  protective  tariff,  the  following  article  from  a  Western  paper  shows  : 

IRON-MAKING   IN   THE   WEST.      PROGRESS    OP    THE   MARQUETTE   DISTRICT. 

"  The  Marquette  (Michigan)  iron  district  is  invested  with  special  interest  as  one 
of  the  most  recently  developed  iron-producing  regions,  and  as  the  source  whence 
the  ore  is  received  for  one-fifth  of  all  the  iron  manufactured  in  the  United  States. 
The  history  and  statistics  of  this  region,  which  lies  on  the  shores  of  Lake  Su 
perior,  have  been  recently  compiled  by  Mr.  A.  P.  Swineford,  and  present  some 
gratifying  facts.  The  following  statement  of  the  production  of  ore  and  iron, 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.     361 

I  have  shown  that  of  the  $108,000,000  England  raises 
by  her  tariff  she  gets  $32,712,300  by  duties  on  one  of  our 
agricultural  staples.  Her  duties  on  tobacco  are  taxes,  for 
England  has  no  tobacco-fields  to  develop.  They  are, 
therefore,  not  protective  duties.  Like  our  duties  on  tea, 
coffee,  pepper,  and  spices,  they  are  taxes  purely.  But  let 
us  go  a  little  further  into  this  matter.  England  raises 
$21,667,565  on  spirits.  This  is  an  absolute  discrimination 

from  1856  to  1870,  inclusive,  together  with  the  aggregate  value,  shows  surprising 
progress,  and  affords  conclusive  evidence  of  the  value  of  our  tariff  legislation : 

Year.  Iron  Ore.  Pig-iron.  Value. 

1856 7,000  $28,000 

1857 21,000  60,000 

1858 31,035                  1,629  249,202 

1859 65,679  7,258  575,529 

1860 116,908                  5,600  736,496 

1861 45,430  7,970  419,501 

1862 115,721                 8,590  984,977 

1863 185,257                  9,813  1,416,935 

1864 235,123  13,832  1,867,215 

1865 196,256  12,883  1,590,430 

1866 286,972  18,437  2,405,960 

1867 466,076  30,911  3,475,820 

1868 507,813  38,246  3,992,413 

1869 633,238  39,003  4,968,435 

1870 856,471  49,298  6,300,170 

Total 3,771,989  243,460  $29,069,883 

"  The  product  of  1870  was  from  16  mines.  The  pig-iron  finds  a  market  in  all 
parts  of  the  country.  The  largest  portion  of  the  ore  is  sent  to  Cleveland,  whence 
it  is  re-shipped  to  the  coal-fields  of  the  Mahoning  and  Shenango  Valleys  by 
railroad.  About  100  furnaces  in  Ohio  and  Pennsylvania  use  Lake  Superior  ore, 
while  nearly  all  the  charcoal  furnaces  in  the  Northwest  are  supplied  with  it. 
The  number  of  furnaces  is  rapidly  multiplying — the  new  ones  built  in  1869  in 
creasing  the  demand  for  Lake  Superior  ore  by  at  least  100,000  tons.  The  cost 
of  producing  a  ton  of  pig  iron  in  the  Marquette  district  and  of  placing  it  in  the 
Chicago  market  is  estimated  at  $27  50,  resulting  from  the  following  items :  1£ 
tons  ore  at  $5  per  ton,  $7  50  ;  2  tons  coal,  $6  per  ton,  $12  ;  flux,  $1 ;  labor,  $3~; 
incidentals,  $1 ;  freight  to  Chicago,  $3.  The  cost  of  producing  merchant  iron 
and  delivering  it  in  Chicago  is  estimated  at  $58  62,  which  is  made  up  of  the 
following  items :  H  tons  pig  metal,  $24  50  per  ton,  $30  62 ;  2  tons  coal,  at  $5 
per  ton,  $10  ;  labor,  $15;  freight  to  Chicago,  $3.  The  average  cost  of  mining 
and  delivering  ore  in  the  cars  at  the  mines  is  estimated  at  $2.  The  cost  of  trans 
portation  to  Cleveland  via  Marquette,  was,  last  year,  $4  25,  though  in  many  in 
stances  better  figures  were  obtained.  At  these  rates  the  ore  is  put  upon  the 
dock  at  Cleveland,  at  a  cost  of  $6  25,  where  it  is  sold  at  $8  and  upward,  leaving 
a  net  profit  of  $1  75  per  ton ;  but  this  return  is  on  the  average  considerably  re 
duced  by  other  expenses.  The  iron  ores  of  this  district  are  generally  found  in 
hills,  rising  from  100  to  500  feet  above  the  level  of  the  surrounding  country. 
These  hills  are  simply  immense  deposits  of  iron  ore,  though  partially  or  wholly 
covered  by  layers  of  earth  and  rock.  It  is  true  they  are  also  found  in  the  val 
leys,  but  where  so  found  are  usually  covered  with  a  deep  drift,  and  consequently 
cannot  be  so  easily  mined.  Heavy  losses  were  suffered  in  the  early  development 
of  the  mines,  but  all  the  mines  now  working  are  paying  dividends,  and  liberal 
profits  have  been  realized  during  late  years." 


362      FAEMEES,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PEOTECTION. 

against  our  grain.  Were  that  duty  removed  the  American 
farmer  and  distiller  would  be  working  together,  and  in 
stead  of  exporting  wheat  and  corn  at  prices  that  will  not 
cover  the  cost  of  production  and  transportation  their  pro 
duce  would  be  manufactured  into  alcohol,  pork,  and  lard 
oil;  and  while  our  own  laboring  people  would  have 
cheaper  provisions,  the  farmer  would  greatly  reduce  the 
cost  of  transportation  and  have  an  ample  market  for  his 
grain  in  these  advanced  products  or  manufactures.  Yet 
gentlemen  representing  agricultural  districts  plead  with  us 
to  admit  British  goods  at  lower  rates,  while  she  gathers 
$54,599,865  in  a  single  year  by  imposing  such  duties  on 
tobacco  as  greatly  diminish  its  consumption;  and  such  on 
spirits  as  preclude  the  importation  of  our  grain  in  the  only 
forms  in  which  it  can  be  profitably  exported. 

ENGLAND   A  HIDEOUS   MONOPOLY — FEEE  TRADE   SUP- 
POETS  IT. 

Mr.  Brooks  of  ISTew  York.  Let  me  state  that  our  great 
agricultural  products — cotton,  which  is  an  immense  pro 
duct,  and  wheat,  corn,  etc. — are  admitted  duty  free. 

Mr.  Kelley.  To  that  I  reply  that  they  take  our  cotton 
because  they  cannot  live  without  it,  and  our  wheat  and 
corn  when  they  cannot  buy  cereals  cheaper  elsewhere. 
France  has  a  duty  on  wheat  and  flour  even  when  imported 
in  French  vessels.  Our  great  wheat  fields  are  too  far  from 
the  sea-board,  and  the  cost  of  transportation  is  too  great 
for  us  to  send  them  grain  in  bulk  at  present  prices.  The 
cheapest  way  of  transporting  corn  is  in  the  form  of  alco 
hol.  In  this  form  we  could  send  it  profitably  were  their 
duties  not  prohibitory.  England  will  take  raw  materials 
from  countries  from  which  she  can  buy  cheapest.  But 
her  much  lauded  free  trade  does  not  offer  any  advantage 
to  the  American  farmer.  Gentlemen  talk  about  monopo 
lists,  and  aver  that  protection  fosters  monopolies.  Sir,  the 
world  has  never  seen  another  so  heartless,  so  unrelenting, 
and  so  gigantic  a  monopoly  as  the  British  Government 
and  the  manufacturing  power  that  sustains  it.  It  is  a 
monopoly  which  has  desolated  Ireland  and  swept  her  fac 
tories  from  the  face  of  the  earth.  Ireland,  less  than  a 
century  ago,  before  the  union,  the  home  of  a  contented 
people,  and  the  seat  of  busy  and  prosperous  industries,  is 
now  a  land  whose  people  are  born  only  to  be  watched 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.      363 

and  hunted  as  felons,  or  exiled  from  the  land  they  love 
so  well.  The  manufacturing  and  landed  monopoly  of 
England  but  a  few  years  ago  huddled  into  their  graves 
the  decaying  bodies  of  more  than  1,000,000  of  the  people 
of  Ireland,  who  died  of  starvation  in  a  single  year.* 

It  is  a  monopoly  which  has  inflicte'd  on  British  India 
wrongs  even  greater  than  these.  Three  years  ago  the  air 
of  the  whole  wide  district  of  Orissa  was  fetid  with  the 
stench  rising  from  the  decaying  bodies  of  more  than 
1,000,000  people  who  had  starved  in  one  of  the  richest 
agricultural  regions  in  the  world,  because  under  England's 
enlightened  free  trade  they  were  not  permitted  to  diversify 
their  industries,  and  when  their  single  crop  failed  they 
were  permitted  to  starve,  as  the  Irish  were  when  the  rot 
assailed  their  only  crop,  the  potato.  This  English  mo 
nopoly  is  so  absolute  and  selfish  that  it  will  not  allow 
provinces  and  colonies  to  diversify  their  industry.  It 
binds  them  to  the  culture  of  one  product — India,  cotton, 
and  Ireland,  men  for  exportation.  Shall  she  also  hold 
the  people  of  the  Northwest  as  her  commercial  subjects 
and  doom  them  to  raise  wheat  and  wheat  alone  ?  We 
can  break  its  power  and  overthrow  this  monstrous  mo 
nopoly.  Yes,  by  peaceful  arts,  without  the  clash  of  arms, 
we  can  emancipate  the  hundreds  of  millions  of  people 
England  now  oppresses.  The  source  of  her  power  is  her 
commercial  and  manufacturing  supremacy,  and  this  we 
can  and  should  undermine,  as  we  are  its  chief  support. 
With  our  cotton-fields,  our  widespread  and  inexhaustible 
deposits  of  all  the  metals,  and  our  immense  sheep-walks, 
we  should  supply  all  our  wants.  When  we  do  this  our 
commerce  will  revive,  for  populous  nations  that  supply 
their  own  markets  always  produce  a  surplus  which  they 
can  export  at  low  prices.  But  now  England  properly  re 
gards  us  as  a  dependency  more  profitable  than  "  all  the 
English-speaking  dependencies  of  the  empire."  On  this 
point  the  London  Times  of  February  25,  when  discussing 
the  bill  now  under  consideration,  says : 

*  Ireland  with  a  population  of  5,500,000  has  15,500,000  acres  of  arable  land, 
most  of  it  naturally  rich  ;  while  Belgium,  with  a  population  of  4,894,000,  has 
but  6,428,000  acres,  generally  by  nature  poor.  Yet  Ireland  it  is  which,  according 
to  the  "dismal  philosopher,"  is  "over  populated,"  and  it  certainly  is  the 
country  from  which  men  flee  to  escape  beggary  and  starvation, — that  starvation 
which  has  within  a  quarter  of  acentury  carried  off  many  hundreds  of  thousands 
of  their  fellow  countrymen.  Belgium  on  the  contrary  is  one  of  the  most  pros 
perous  countries  of  Europe — its  people  steadily  advancing  in  material  wealth 
as  well  as  in  intelligence  and  happiness. 


864      FARMEKS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 

"The  fiscal  policy  of  the  United  States  is  for  us  a  subject  of  no 
remote  or  transient  interest.  Although  statistics  may  be  adduced 
to  prove  that  in  proportion  to  population  the  colonies  are  our  best 
customers,  yet  in  the  mass  our  trade  with  republican  America  is  by 
far  the  largest  item  in  the  balance-sheet  of  our  exports  to  foreign 
countries,  and  is  nearly  equal  to  that  with  all  the  English-speaking 
dependencies  of  the  empire." 

A   HOME   MARKET — A   PREDICTION   FULFILLED. 

Gentlemen  sneer  at  the  idea  of  a  home  market.  Sir,  on 
the  1st  of  June,  1868,  we  had  under  consideration  a  pro 
position  to  permit  table  whisky  to  remain  in  bond  under 
certain  conditions.  In  the  course  of  the  discussion  I 
urged  upon  gentlemen  from  the  West  who  were  opposing 
it  the  propriety  of  giving  effect  to  that  proposition.  I 
pressed  upon  the  attention  of  the  House  the  fact  that  age 
quadrupled  the  value  by  improving  the  quality  of  fine 
whisky,  and  that  whisky  distilled  from  American  grain 
was  superseding  French  brandy  in  general  use.  I  urged 
the  importance  of  this  to  the  grain-growing  States.  Turn 
ing  to  my  remarks  I  find  the  following  prediction,  the 
fulfilment  of  which  has  occurred  even  before  I  expected 
it: 

"The  people  of  the  Northwest,  it  seems  to  me,  are  specially  in 
terested  in  this  question.  They  will  find  that  they  cannot  afford  to 
expel  from  their  inland  section  of  the  country  any  branch  of  manu 
factures.  They  need  the  opportunity  to  export  their  grain  concen 
trated  in  the  form  of  whisky,  high-wines,  or  other  manufactures.  I 
am  no  Cassandra  and  they  will  not  believe  me,  but  I  tell  them  they 
are  entering  upon  a  competition  that  will  exclude  them  from  the 
markets  of  the  world  if  they  depend  upon  the  export  of  their  grain 
in  bulk  as  food  or  mere  raw  material.  Do  you  mark,  gentlemen  of 
Missouri,  Illinois,  and  Wisconsin,  that  California  is  loud  in  the  ex 
pression  of  her  gratitude  for  the  fact  that  130'vessels  have  been 
added  to  the  fleet  for  carrying  her  grain  to  New  York  and  trans 
atlantic  ports  ?  They  can  send  grain  in  bulk  23,000  miles  to  the  sea 
board  of  New  England  or  Old  England  at  less  cost  for  transporta 
tion  than  you  can  send  yours  to  the  sea-board  by  rail.  Oregon  is 
groaning  under  her  crop  of  wheat,  and  her  people  are  fearing  that 
means  of  its  transportation  to  market  may  not  be  at  hand.  But 
this  distant  competition  is  not  what  you  have  most  cause  to  dread. 
The  South,  no  longer  your  customer  for  food  for  man  and  beast, 
looms  up  your  competitor.  Her  advantages  over  you  are  mainfold 
as  they  are  manifest.  She  lies  between  you  and  the  ocean.  Her 
grain-fields  are  upon  the  banks  of  navigable  rivers  which  flow  to  the 
Gulf  or  the  ocean,  and  at  or  near  the  mouth  of  each  is  a  sea-port. 
From  Norfolk  around  to  Galveston.  Texas,  the  grain  of  the  farmers 
of  the  several  States  may  be  floated  to  the  sea-board  upon  rafts  and 
there  find  shipping.  England  and  western  Europe  are  not  the 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.      365 

countries  to  which  we  chiefly  export  grain  and  flour.  Oar  chief 
markets  for  these  are  Central  and  South  America,  and  the  islands  to 
which  the  Southern  States  are  neighbors  ;  and  I  tell  you  that  if  the 
people  of  the  far  Northwest  do  not  take  heed,  and  by  diversifying 
their  industry  convert  their  raw  materials  into  more  compact  pro 
ductions,  the  day  is  not  three  years  distant  when  their  crops  will 
waste  in  the  fields  for  the  want  of  a  market  to  which  they  will  pay 
the  cost  of  transportation."* 

Not  two  years  have  gone  by,  and  you  are  crying  out 
that  you  have  raised  wheat  in  vain,  that  there  is  no 
market  for  it ;  that  the  cost  of  getting  it  to  a  market  con- 
*  sumes  it.  Ay,  and  the  gentleman  from  Iowa  [Mr.  Alli 
son]  says  that  in  the  face  of  these  facts  we  are  offering 
inducements  to  thousands  to  go  at  wheat-growing,  that 
the  homestead  law  is  tempting  immigrants  to  engage  in 
wheat-growing  and  add  to  the  unsalable  and  unavailable 
stock.  That  is  true  ;  and  how  would  he  improve  matters  ? 
He  agrees  with  me  that  the  homestead  law  is  beneficent 
and  should  not  be  repealed.  AVhat,  then,  is  his  proposi 
tion.  It  is  identical  with  those  we  have  heard  from  so 
many  gentlemen — repeal  the  duties  on  coal,  and  salt,  and 
reduce  those  on  hides,  lumber,  iron,  and  woolen  goods. 

This  is  the  burden  and  refrain  of  all  the  sweet  singers 
trained  in  the  musical  academy  of  D.  A.  Wells,  Com 
missioner  of  Revenue,  and  let  us  right  here  test  its  merit. 
Lower  the  duties  on  coal,  salt,  lumber,  hides,  iron,  and 
woolen  goods.  Well,  how  will  this  increase  the  number 
of  consumers  of  American  grain  or  diminish  the  number 
of  grain-growers?  There  are  more  than  1,500,000  of  our 
people  engaged  in  or  dependent  on  the  labor  of  producing 
these  articles.  What  will  become  of  them  ?  They  can 
not  live  on  "  rye  and  potatoes,"  as  German  workmen  in  the 


*  The  prices  of  grain  in  Philadelphia,  July  1st,  1868,  and  July  1st,  1871, 
were  as  follows : 


1868. 

Wheat S2.30  @  $2.37 

Corn 1.10  @     1.13 

Oats 85  @       .89 


1871. 

Wheat $1.40  @  1.54 

Corn 73  @    .76 

Oats 61  (a     .66 


But  even  at  these  reduced  rates  there  is,  as  I  know  by  observation  and  inter 
course  with  many  of  their  people,  while  traversing  each  State  during  July  and 
August,  1871,  no  market  for  the  immense  crops  with  which  the  farmers  of  Mis 
souri,  Iowa,  Kansas  and  Nebraska  have  been,  shall  I  say,  blessed  or  cursed.  As 
they  cannot  sell  their  grain  and  provisions,  they  are  of  course  without  money 
with  which  to  pay  for  manufactured  articles  whether  foreign  or  American. 
A  few  additional  forges,  furnaces,  rolling-mills,  and  woolen  factories  would  have 
developed  the  coal-fields  of  each  State  and  given  the  farmers  a  renumerative 
home  market  for  every  bushel  of  corn  and  wheat,  and  saved  the  cost  of  transporta 
tion  on  the  small  amount  for  which  they  may  find  a  market. 


366 

same  trades  do.  They  will  not  even  be  content  to  get 
meat  once  a  week,  as  the  workmen  of  England  are;  and 
if  they  be  not,  work  must  stop.  And  I  ask  gentlemen 
from  the  grain  country  what  they  suppose  these  people 
will  do  with  themselves  when  the  fire  has  gone  out  in  the 
forge  and  furnace,  and  the  loom  and  spindle  stand  still, 
and  the  salt-kettle  rusts,  and  there  is  no  work  in  the  coal 
mine  because  the  manufactures  that  made  a  market  for  it 
have  been  transferred  to  foreign  countries  in  which  wages 
are  low  and  where  the  "working  people  live  on  rye  and 
potatoes  "  ? 

Thank  God,  we  cannot  doom  them  to  this  fate.  The 
homestead  law  is  their  protection.  In  a  cabin  on  120 
acres  of  public  land  they  can  raise  wheat,  potatoes,  and  a 
few  sheep  and  pigs ;  the  old-fashioned  spinning-wheel  and 
loom,  easily  made  by  skilled  mechanics,  will  convert  their 
home-grown  wool  into  fabrics,  arid  they  can  thus  live  till 
wiser  legislators  succeed  us  and  reanimate  the  general 
industries  of  the  country  by  restoring  the  protective  sys 
tem  now  in  force. 

Is  theirs  the  true  remedy  ?  Is  free  trade  a  specific  for  all 
or  any  of  our  ills?  No,  sir,  it  is  sheer  quackery,  char 
latanism.  The  only  cure  for  the  evil  of  which  western 
grain-growers  complain,  is  to  increase  the  number  of  con 
sumers  and  relatively  decrease  the  number  of  growers  of 
wheat  and  corn ;  raise,  if  possible,  the  wages  of  workmen  so 
as  to  make  mechanical  employments  attractive ;  say  to  the 
farmers'  sons,  "  There  is  work  and  good  wages  for  you  in 
the  machine-shop,  the  forge,  the  furnace,  or  the  mill;" 
say  to  the  men  whose  capital  is  unproductive  on  farms, 
u Build  mills,  sink  shafts  to  the  coal-bed  which  underlies 
your  farm :  avail  yourselves  of  the  limestone  quarry  and 
the  ore-bed,  whether  of  iron,  lead,  copper,  zinc,  or  nickel; 
employ  your  industry  and  capital  so  that  it  shall  be  pro 
fitable  to  you,  your  country,  and  mankind;"  and  in  a 
little  while  you  will  cheapen  iron  and  steel  and  make  an. 
adequate  market  for  all  the  grain  of  the  country.  The 
gentleman's  remedy  is  the  theory  of  the  homeopathic 
physician,  that  like  cures  like,  which  though  it  may  be 
correct  in  physics,  is  not  an  approved  maxim  in  social 
science. 

Mr.  Allison.  I  would  like  the  gentleman  to  state  how 
long  it  will  be  before  that  happy  period  will  arrive  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.     Well,   sir,  I  cannot  tell  exactly.     It  will 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.       367 

depend  upon  the  degree  of  promptness  with  which  the 
remedy  is  applied.  But  if  the  Clerk  will  do  me  the  kind 
ness  to  give  me  a  little  rest  by  reading  a  letter  from  an 
Irish  patriot,  one  who  knew  England's  tenderness  for  her 
laboring  people  experimentally  at  home  in  Ireland,  and 
who  laid  one  of  his  limbs  away  in  the  service  of  our  coun 
try  during  the  war,  and  now  lives  in  Quincy,  Illinois,  I 
will  endeavor  to  give  the  gentleman  some  idea. 
The  Clerk  read  as  follows : 

"  We  have  a  population  of  35,000  or  40,000,  and  our  citizens  are 
just  commencing1  to  awake  to  the  necessity  of  encouraging  local 
manufacturing.  We  have  2  paper  mills,  10  flour  mills,  5  tobacco 
factories;  sales  $1,300,000;  9  machine-shops;  sales  $1,050,000;  5 
machine  founderies ;  5  stove  founderies  turned  out  last  year  36,400 
stoves,  amounting  to  $473.200  cash  sales ;  2  boiler  shops,  turning 
out  $216,000  per  year  ;  15  wagon  and  plow  shops,  with  a  capital  of 
$260,000  ;  4  planing  mills,  capital  $180.000 ;  14  manufacturers  of 
saddles  arid  harness,  capital  $233,400 ;  and  numerous  others  too 
tedious  to  mention.  There  is  a  company  at  present  engaged  in 
boring  for  coal,  with  fine  prospects  of  success.  If  we  can  only  get 
coal  here  manufacturing  will  spring  up  all  around  us.  I  have 
thought  some  of  organizing  a  stock  company  to  build  factories  and 
supply  funds  to  encourage  skilled  workmen  to  enter  into  what  is 
called  the  cooperative  system.  I  shall  shortly  test  the  matter  to  se« 
if  it  can  be  made  to  work. 

"If  the  friends  of  protection  can  hold  their  own  till  after  the  tak. 
ing  of  the  census  the  crisis  will  be  passed,  for  that  will  show  such 
progress  in  the  material  wealth  of  the  nation  that  it  will  require  a 
bold  man  indeed  to  attack  our  system  of  labor.  It  is  useless  for  us 
to  talk  of  competing  with  England  while  she  keeps  as  many  of  her 
people  in  her  poor-houses  as  she  does  in  her  public  schools — a 
country  that  expends  seven-eighths  more  to  keep  up  her  poor- 
houses  than  she  does  to  support  her  schools.  England  and  Scot 
land  have  a  population  of  24,599.277,  for  the  education  of  which  she 
has  14,591  schools,  with  12,832  teachers,  costing  annually  $4,212,500, 
while  she  expends  for  her  poor-houses  annually  $32,595,000.  Com 
pare  her  with  Illinois,  a  State  sixty  years  ago  in  possession  of  the 
savages,  but  now  possessing  a  population  of  about  2,500,000,  with 
11,000  schools  and  20,000  teachers,  costing  $6,500,000  annually, 
more  than  50  per  cent,  greater  than  England,  with  a  population  ten 
times  larger  than  us.  The  free-trader  says  that  pauperism  is  grow 
ing  less  in  England  under  her  free-trade  system ;  but  I  find,  from 

"  the  Ameri- 
are  reported. 

people  to  profit  by.  It  is  reported 
that  there  are  now  in  London  more  than  80,000  skilled  workmen 
out  of  employment.  We  hear  much  about  English  liberty,  but  I 
have  been  of  the  opinion  that  the  kind  of  liberty  they  are  enjoying 
is  that  the  wolf  accords  the  lamb,  or  the  strong  the  weak  in  all 
nations — a  liberty  which,  I  trust,  will  never  find  a  place  among  our 
institutions. 


368       FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 

"  The  sympathizers  or  advocates  of  this  English  system  say  that 
free  trade  will  give  us  a  market  for  our  surplus  produce  in  Europe. 
But  I  find  the  more  we  ship  the  less  we  receive.  In  1868  we  ex 
ported  to  England  4,414,230  hundred  weight  of  wheat,  receiving 
therefor  $17,952,850 ;  in  1869,  for  the  same  period,  7,938,818  hun 
dred  weight,  receiving  therefrom  only  $17,740.770,  or  $211,000  less 
than  we  received  for  half  the  amount  the  previous  year.  If  we  were 
to  change  our  policy,  and  instead  of  sending  our  wheat  to  England 
induce  those  80,000  skilled  workmen  to  come  to  us  we  would  not 
then  be  compelled  to  look  to  England  for  a  market.  They  will  be 
compelled  to  come  to  us  for  our  cotton  and  tobacco ;  but  there  is 
no  need  of  us  going  to  them  for  manufactured  goods.  We  can  take 
their  surplus  labor,  transfer  it  to  this  country,  which  would  ulti 
mately  tend  to  the  welfare  of  both,  and  thereby  accomplish  more 
than  the  sentimental  philanthropists  of  Europe  and  America  can 
ever  do  by  preaching  '  free  trade.'  We  are  influenced  too  much 
by  the  polical  economists  of  Europe,  who  write  to  tickle  the  fancy 
of  the  wealthy  few  without  any  regard  to  the  rights  of  the  laboring 
millions." 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  desire  in  this  connection,  and  before 
turning  to  other  topics,  to  present  a  brief  extract  from  a 
speech  made  in  the  United  States  Senate  by  the  experi 
enced  merchant  and  enligtened  statesman  who  represents 
New  Jersey  in  that  body,  Hon.  Alexander  G.  Cattell. 
In  the  course  of  his  remarks  on  the  22d  of  January,  1867, 
he  said : 

"But,  Mr.  President,  the  harmony  of  interests  which  exists 
between  agriculture  and  manufactures,  and  the  truth  of  the  position 
I  have  taken,  are  clearly  shown  by  actual  results.  I  am  sure  the 
Senate  will  excuse  me  if  I  draw  an  illustration  from  personal  ob 
servation  in  my  own  mercantile  life.  Twenty  years  ago  last  autumn 
I  embarked  in  the  trade  in  breadstuff's  in  the  city  of  Philadelphia. 
At  that  time,  and  for  some  succeeding  years,  the  entire  volume 
of  my  business  was  made  up  of  consignments  of  agricultural  pro 
ducts  from  the  valleys  of  the  Susquehanna,  the  Juniata,  and  the 
Lehigh.  I  have  not  the  figures  at  command,  but  I  am  sure  I  speak 
within  bounds  when  I  say  that  my  own  house  and  the  four  or  five 
others  doing  business  from  the  same  points  must  have  received 
from  this  quarter  4,000,000  to  5,000,000  bushels  of  cereals  per 
annum.  Philadelphia  is  still  the  natural  market  for  the  surplus 
product  of  this  territory,  but  for  some  years  past  there  have  not 
been  consignments  enough  received  from  that  entire  section  to 
realize  commissions  sufficient  to  pay  the  salary  of  a  receiving 
clerk. 

"Do  you  ask,  has  production  fallen  off?  I  answer,  no ;  on  the 
contrary,  it  has  increased,  but  the  whole  line  of  these  valleys  has 
been  dotted  with  furnaces  and  forges,  arid  rolling-mills  and  saw-mills 
and  factories  and  workshops,  filled  with  operatives,  and  the  con 
sumer  of  agricultural  products  has  been  brought  to  the  farmer's 
doors.  He  now  finds  a  readier  market  for  his  products  at  home  at 
prices  equal  to  those  ruling  on  the  sea-board,  of  which  lie  avails 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.       369 

himself  and  thus  saves  all  the  cost  of  transportation  and  factorage, 
equal  at  average  prices  to  about  20  per  cent.  Nay,  more,  sir,  my 
own  firm  has  frequently  within  the  past  few  years  sold  and  shipped 
to  the  millers  in  one  of  these  valleys,  that  in  which  the  iron  interest 
has  been  most  developed,  the  Lehigh,  wheat  drawn  from  Michigan, 
Illinois,  Wisconsin,  and  Iowa  to  supply  the  deficiency  in  the  con 
sumptive  want.  And  these  products  of  the  prairies  of  the  West 
were  sold,  too,  at  a  price  far  in  excess  of  what  could  have  been 
realized  by  exportation  to  any  country  on  the  face  of  the  globe. 
As-  a  consequence  of  this  state  of  things  land  has  risen  in  value 
through  all  this  section,  and  farms  that  could  have  been  bought 
fifteen  or  twenty  years  ago  at  $40  or  $50  per  acre  are  now  saleable 
at  $150  or  $200  per  acre.  Villages  have  grown  to  be  towns,  and 
towns  have  grown  to  be  cities,  agriculture  and  manufactures  have 
clasped  hands  and  prosperity  reigns." 

PROTECTION   STIMULATES   IMMIGRATION. 

Sir,  the  gentleman  from  Iowa  asked  how  long  it  would 
take  if  we  shut  up  our  machine-shops  and  mills,  and 
closed  our  coal-mines,  to  turn  100,000  men  into  agricul 
turists.  It  would  take  one  season. 

Mr.  Allison.     Oh  no;  that  was  not  my  question. 

Mr.  Kelky.  That  was  what  I  was  stating  when  you 
interrupted  me. 

Mr.  Allison.  I  wanted  to  know  how  long  it  would  be 
before  iron  and  steel  would  be  produced  at  a  cheaper 
rate  than  it  is  now  imported.  That  was  my  question. 

Mr.  Kelleij.  I  do  not  think  I  said  cheaper  than  it  is 
now  imported,  but  cheaper  than  it  can  then  be  imported.  As 
the  price  goes  down  here  it  is  going  up  in  England;  and 
under  the  present  duty  we  will  soon  be  able  to  supply 
our  own  demand,  and  meet  England  in  common  markets 
at  equal  prices.  Sir,  I  want  to  show  gentlemen  from  the 
West  what  effect  the  tariff  has  on  immigration.  I  have 
before  me  the  tariffs  from  the  organization  of  the  Govern 
ment  down  to  the  present  time,  given  in  ad  valorem  per 
centages,  and  a  statement  of  the  number  of  immigrants 
that  arrived  in  each  year,  from  1856  to  1869  inclusive. 
By  comparing  them  I  find  that  whenever  our  duties  have 
been  low  immigration  has  fallen  off,  and  whenever  our 
duties  have  been  high  the  volume  of  immigration  has 
increased.  This  seems  to  be  a  fixed  law. 

Both  papers  are  taken  from  the  immaculate  report 
of  David  A.  Wells,  Special  Commissioner  of  Internal 
Revenue,  and  I  therefore  present  them  with  some  hesi 
tancy,  and  with  the  remark  that  if  they  are  incorrect  it  ia 
not  my  fault. 
24 


370        FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 

I  find  by  these  tables  that  in  the  nine  years  from  1856 
to  1864,  inclusive,  we  received  1,403,497  immigrants; 
and  in  the  four  years  of  the  protective  tariff,  of  which  so 
many  gentlemen  from  the  West  whose  States  are  not 
overcrowded  complain,  we  have  received  1,514,816,  or 
over  111,000  more  in  the  four  years  of  protection  than  in 
the  nine  preceding  years  of  free  trade  and  low  tariff.  But 
I  had  better  let  the  statement  speak  for  itself.  In  intro 
ducing  it  Mr.  Wells  says: 

"The  following  is  a  revised  and  the  most  accurate  attainable 
statement  of  the  course  of  alien  immigration  into  the  United  States 
since  and  including  the  year  1856  : 

1856 200,436 

1857 251,306 

1858 123,126 

1859 121,282 

1860 153,640 

1861 , 91,920 

1862 91,987 

1863 176,282 

1864 193,418 

1865 248,120 

1866 318,554 

1867 298,358 

1868 297,215 

1869 352,569 


Total  in  fourteen  years 2,918,213 

"Total  from  July  1,  1865,  to  June  30,  1869,  five  years,  1,514,816." 

In  1856  the  rate  of  duty  on  the  aggregate  of  our  im 
ports  was  20.3,  and  the  number  of  immigrants  were  200,- 
436 ;  in  1859  the  rate  of  duties  had  been  reduced  to  14.6, 
and  the  number  of  immigrants  fell  to  121,282.  In  1861, 
by  the  Acts  of  March  2,  August  5,  and  December  24,  the 
rate  of  duties  was  further  reduced  to  11.2.  This  broke 
the  camel's  back.  So  many  men  were  thrown  out  of  em 
ployment  and  wages  sunk  so  low  that  none  but  agricultur 
ists  could  come  to  us  with  any  prospect  of  improving 
their  condition,  and  immigration  sunk  to  a  point  lower 
chan  it  had  been  since  the  ever-to-be-remembered  free- 
trade  crisis  of  1837-40.  In  1861  but  91,920  immi 
grants  arrived,  and  the  depression  continued  through 
1862,  during  which  the  number  of  immigrants  was  but 
91,987.  By  the  Act  of  July  14,  1862,  the  duties  were 
raised,  so  that  in  1863  they  were  up  to  23.7,  and  the 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.      371 

immigration  nearly  equaled  that  of  the  two  preceding 
years,  having  gone  up  176,282.  By  the  several  Acts 
of  186-1,  1865,  and  1866  the  duties  were  so  increased, 
that  they  averaged  on  the  importations  of  1866  40.2  per 
cent.,  and  immigration  went  up  to  318,554.  Last  year,  when 
the  West  was  further  oppressed  by  the  increase  of  duties 
on  wool  and  copper,  they  averaged  41.2,  and  the  number 
of  immigrants  went  up  to  352,569  ;  and  the  commissioners 
of  immigration  assure  us  that  this  year  the  number  will 
exceed  400,000. 

It  is  thus  historically  demonstrated  that  precisely  as  we 
make  our  duties  protective  of  high  wages  for  labor,  do  we 
bring  skilled  workmen  from  Germany,  Belgium,  France, 
and  England  to  work  in  our  mines,  forges,  furnaces,  roll 
ing-mills,  cotton  and  woolen  factories,  and  create  a  home 
market  for  the  grain  of  Iowa,  Illinois,  and  other  States, 
whose  farmers  complain  that  they  have  no  market  for 
their  crops. 

SKILLED   WORKMEN   THE   MOST   VALUABLE    COMMODITY 
WE    CAN   IMPORT. 

Mr.  Schenck.  We  have  free  trade  in  men. 

Mr.  Kelley.  The  chairman  of  the  Committee  of  Ways 
and  Means  suggests  in  this  connection  that  we  have 
free  trade  in  men.  Yes,  men  are  on  the  free  list.  They 
cost  us  not  even  freight.  Yet  how  they  swell  the 
revenues  and  help  to  pay  the  debt  of  the  country !  They 
are  raised  from  helpless  infancy,  through  tender  childhood, 
and  trained  to  skilled  labor  in  youth  in  other  lands,  and 
in  manhood,  allured  by  higher  wages  and  freer  institutions, 
they  come  to  us  and  are  welcomed  to  citizenship.  In  this 
way  we  have  maintained  a  balance  of  trade  that  has  ena 
bled  us  to  resist  without  bankruptcy  the  ordinary  com 
mercial  balance  that  has  been  so  heavily  against  us.  We 
promote  free  trade  in  men,  and  it  is  the  only  free  trade  I 
am  prepared  to  promote. 

FRENCH    FREE   TRAD 

The  French  tariff  is  as  inimical  to  us  as  that  of  England, 
It  is  replete  with  prohibitory  duties  and  absolute  prohibi 
tions.  Yet  France  is  spoken  of  by  the  English  journals 
and  in  the  rhapsodies  of  gentlemen  as  a  free  trade  nation. 
Why,  sir,  on  every  article  mentioned  in  the  French  tariff, 
unless  it  is  absolutely  free,  the  duty  is  so  much  if  imported 
in  French  vessels,  and  so  much  more  if  imported  in  vessels 


372       FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 


of  other  nations.  Every  head  of  a  column  of  the  rates  of 
duty  established  by  the  French  tariff  shows  that  you  can 
not  import  dutiable  articles  into  France  at  the  same  rate 
in  the  vessel  of  another  nation  that  you  can  in  a  French 
one.  They  read  thus : 


Articles. 

General  tariff. 

Import  tariff  in  treaty 
with    Great   Britain 
and  other  countries. 

Imports. 

In  French 
and  treaty 

vessels. 

In  other 

vessels. 

In 
French 
vessels. 

In 

other 
vessels. 

Mr.  Allison.  Are  you  in  favor  of  that  rule? 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  am. 

Mr.  Allison.  So  am  I. 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  am  in  favor  of  imposing  duties  so  as  to 
discriminate  in  favor  of  American  shipping.  I  am  for 
every  form  of  protection  to  American  industry  and  enter 
prise. 

In  the  French  tariff  tobacco  is  classed  as  a  colonial  pro 
duct,  and  its  importation  on  private  account  is  prohibited. 
It  is  a  Government  monopoly.  American-grown  tobacco, 
even  in  the  leaf,  is  admitted  into  France  only  when  the 
colonial  supply  fails ;  and  then  if  it  is  carried  in  other 
than  a  French  vessel  it  is  made  to  pay  an  extra  duty  of 
nearly  one  cent  on  the  pound,  which  is  imposed  in  order 
to  tax  foreign  shipping. 

The  gentleman  from  Iowa  objects  to  the  schedule  under 
which  duties  are  to  be  assessed  under  the  committee's  bill, 
and  especially  to  that  of  sugar.  Let  me  invite  his  atten 
tion  to  some  of  the  provisions  of  the  French  tariff  on  su 
gar  :  Sugar  from  other  than  French  possessions ;  sugar 
similar  to  refined  powdered,  above  No.  20,  from  foreign 
countries,  etc. ;  and  sugar,  refined,  from  other  possessions, 
are  prohibited.  Thus  all  sugars  refined  or  advanced  in 
other  than  French  possessions  are  prohibited,  as  is  also 
molasses. 

Mr.  SchencJc.  That  has  built  up  their  beet-sugar  manu 
facture. 

Mr.  Kelley.  Yes ;  and  it  is  an  industry  we  can  and  should 
build  up  in  the  West  by  adequately  protective  duties.  I 


373 

want  to  run  cursorily  through  this  French  tariff.  The  im 
portation  of  cast-iron  into  France  is  prohibited.  Wrought- 
iron  in  plates  is  prohibited.  Manufactures  of  iron  of  certain 
kinds  are  prohibited.  All  chemical  products  not  enume 
rated  are  prohibited.  All  extracts  of  dye-woods  are  pro 
hibited.  Dye-woods  are  admitted  free;  but  if  American 
or  other  labor  has  been  expended  in  making  extracts  from 
dye-woods  the  extracts  are  prohibited.  Gentlemen  of  the 
free  trade  school  generally  and  the  gentlemen  from  New 
York  [Mr.  Brooks]  and  from  Iowa  [Mr.  Allison]  assail 
vehemently,  and,  as  I  think,  most  unfairly,  the  iron  sche 
dule  and  duties  on  steel  proposed  by  the  committee's  bill. 
How  differently  France  estimates  the  importance  of  these 
vital  industries.  Her  tariff  prohibits  all  manufactures  of 
zinc  and  other  metals  not  specially  named  and  the  follow 
ing  articles  of  iron  and  steel,  in  the  production  of  which 
we  excel  both  her  and  England  in  quality  and  cheapness : 

"  Castings,  not  polished :  chairs  for  railroads,  plates,  etc.,  cast  in 
open  air  ;  cylindric  tubes,  plain  or  grooved  columns,  gas-retorts,  etc., 
and  other  articles  without  ornament  or  finish ;  hollow-ware 
not  included  above ;  castings,  polished  or  turned ;  the  same, 
tinned,  varnished,  etc.  ;  household  utensils  and  other  articles  not 
enumerated,  of  iron  or  sheet-iron,  polished  or  painted  ;  same,  enam 
eled  or  varnished ;  all  articles  of  steel ;  iron,  blacksmiths'  work ; 
locksmiths'  work ;  nails,  by  machine  ;  nails,  by  hand ;  wood-screws, 
bolts,  screw-nuts." 

France  prohibits  and  excludes  these  articles  that  her 
poorly  paid  workmen  may  be  protected  against  the  pro 
ductions  of  those  of  Belgium  and  Germany,  who  receive 
even  less  than  they.  All  tissues  of  cotton,  except  nankeens, 
the  produce  of  India,  lace,  manufactured  by  hand  or  other 
wise,  and  tulle,  with  lace-work,  are  also  prohibited.  Cotton 
and  woolen  yarns  are  also  prohibited  by  the  general  tariff, 
though  admitted  at  high  and  most  scientifically  rated  pro 
tective  duties  from  England  under  the  import  tariff  treaty 
with  that*  country. 

Yes,  sir,  if  you  spin  our  cotton  into  yarn,  or  weave  it  into 
a  tissue  or  fabric,  it  is  excluded  from  the  broad  empire  of 
France.  If  you  carry  it  there  raw,  with  no  labor  in  it  save 
that  of  the  slave  or  the  freedman,  you  can  take  it  in,  but  as 
yarn  or  a  tissue  it  is  prohibited. 

THE    PURPOSE    OF   THE   FREE   LIST. 

The  committee  in  proposing  the  extended  free  list  em- 


874      FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION-. 

braced  in  the  second  section  of  the  bill  hoped  to  accomplish 
two  important  objects,  one  of  which  was  to  promote  direct 
commerce  between  us  and  those  non-manufacturing  coun 
tries  which  require  the  productions  of  our  shops  and  mills, 
and  whose  raw  materials  we  require ;  and  the  other  was 
to  give  our  manufacturers  and  mechanics,  free  of  duty, 
those  essentials  which  France,  England,  and  Belgium  admit 
free.  A  majority  of  the  committee  believe  that  the  adop 
tion  of  this  will  do  much  to  revive  our  commerce,  and  not 
only  quicken  established  industries,  but  lead  to  the  intro 
duction  of  new  ones,  and  thus  increase  the  market  for  the 
productions  of  the  farm  and  reduce  the  cost  and  price  of  a 
large  range  of  manufactured  goods.  We  think  it  is  sound 
policy  to  let  raw  materials  that  we  cannot  produce  in  free, 
and  collect  our  revenue  from  articles  in  the  production  of 
which  much  labor  has  been  expended.  This  is  the  theory 
of  the  bill  we  reported.  It  has  the  sanction  of  the 
sagacity  and  experience  of  France  and  England,  and  was 
framed  regardless  of  the  teachings  of  mere  theorists  and 
schoolmen. 

DUTIES    ON    WOOL   AND   WOOLENS. 

Mr.  Chairman,  although  I  had  made  some  preparation 
for  its  illustration,  I  had  not  expected  to  go  into  so  general 
a  discussion  of  the  effect  of  protection  upon  the  interests 
of  the  farmer.  The  wide  range  the  discussion  has  taken 
must  be  my  apology  for  presenting  one  other  view  of  the 
subject.  The  gentleman  from  Iowa  told  us  that  the  wool 
interest  is  suffering  from  the  excessive  duties  imposed  on 
woolen  cloths  by  the  existing  tariff,  and  that  the  committee 
proposes  to  continue  them.  Sir,  I  may  be  very  dull,  but  after 
hearing  the  gentleman  it  still  seems  to  me  that  the  wool 
interest  must  have  been  benefited  by  the  bill  increasing 
the  duties  on  wool  and  woolens.  We  certainly  have  more 
people  wearing  wool  now  than  we  had  in  1860.  We  have, 
as  I  have  shown,  received  over  2,000,000  immigrants  since 
then,  and  our  natural  increase  is  at  least  1,000,000  per 
annum ;  yet  I  find  by  the  thirteenth  report  of  the  commis 
sioners  of  her  Britannic  Majest}^'s  customs  that  the  declared 
value  of  woolen  manufactures  exported  to  the  United 
States  was,  in  1860,  £3,414,050,  while  in  1868,  nearly 
a  decade  thereafter,  it  was  £3,658,432 — an  increase  of  but 
£234,382  in  eight  years. 

Who  has  grown   the  wool   that  clothes  our  increased 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.      375 

population?  Our  freedmen  now  wear  ordinary  woolen 
clothes.  The  "  poor  whites  "  of  the  South  now  wear  what 
they  call  "  store  goods,"  but  to  which  they  were  unused 
before  the  rebellion.  The  cold  Northwest,  whose  people 
wear  woolen  goods  all  the  year,  has  increased  its  popula 
tion  so  largely  that  it  is  demanding  enlarged  representa 
tion  on  this  floor  without  waiting  for  the  census. 

Our  wool-wearing  population  has  nearly  doubled ;  yet 
the  amount  of  wool  imported  is  scarcely  greater  than  it 
was  eight  years  ago.  Where  does  the  wool  come  from? 
Does  it  drop  gently  from  the  heavens,  like  the  dew,  or  is 
it  grown  upon  the  sheep  of  western  and  southern  farmers? 

THE  WAY  TO  REDUCE  THE  TAXES. 

Sir,  I  am  as  anxious  to  reduce  taxes  as  rapidly  as  it  can 
be  done  consistently  with  the  maintenance  of  the  public 
credit  and  the  gradual  extinguishment  of  the  debt  as  any 
man  on  this  floor.  I  do  not  make  this  declaration  now 
for  the  first  time.  On  the  31st  of  January,  1866,  I  saw 
that,  the  war  being  over,  the  freedmen  must  be  provided 
with  the  means  of  making  a  living  by  other  labor  than 
that  of  the  plantation  hand  ;  that  the  women  of  the  South 
must  have  employment ;  that  there  must  be  a  diversifi 
cation  of  our  industry;  that  the  Northwest  would  be 
shut  out  from  her  markets  if  she  did  not  diversify  her  in 
dustries  ;  and  in  the  course  of  some  remarks  I  made  that 
day  in  favor  of  remitting  taxes,  both  internal  and  external, 
I  described  the  bill  now  under  consideration.  In  stating 
how  I  would  reduce  the  burdens  of  the  people,  I  said : 

"  I  have  never  been  able  to  believe  that  a  national  debt  is  a  na 
tional  blessing.  I  have  seen  how  good  might  be  interwoven  with  or 
educed  from  evil,  or  how  a  great  evil  might,  under  certain  conditions, 
be  turned  to  good  account ;  but  beyond  this  I  have  never  been  able 
to  regard  debt,  individual  or  national,  as  a  blessing.  It  may  be  that, 
as  in  the  inscrutable  providence  of  God  it  required  nearly  five  years 
of  war  to  extirpate  the  national  crime  of  slavery,  and  anguish  and 
grief  found  their  way  to  nearly  every  hearth-side  in  the  country  be 
fore  we  would  recognize  the  manhood  of  the  race  we  had  so  long  op 
pressed,  it  was  also  necessary  that  we  should  be  involved  in  a  debt 
of  unparalleled  magnitude  that  we  might  be  compelled  to  avail  our 
selves  of  the  wealth  that  lies  so  freely  around  us,  and  by  opening 
markets  for  well-rewarded  industry  make  our  land,  what  in  theory  it 
has  ever  been,  the  refuge  of  the  oppressed  of  all  climes.  England, 
if  supreme  selfishness  be  consistent  with  sagacity,  has  been  emi 
nently  sagacious  in  preventing  us  from  becoming  a  manufacturing 
people  ;  for  with  our  enterprise,  our  ingenuity,  our  freer  institutions, 
the  extent  of  our  country,  the  cheapness  of  our  land,  the  diversity 


376       FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION. 

of  our  resources,  the  grandeur  of  our  seas,  lakes,  and  rivers,  we 
should  long  ago  have  been  able  to  offer  her  best  workmen  such  in 
ducements  as  would  have  brought  them  by  millions  to  help  bear  our 
burdens  and  fight  our  battles.  We  can  thus  raise  the  standard  of 
British  and  continental  wages  and  protect  American  workmen 
against  ill-paid  competition.  This  we  must  do  if  we  mean  to  main 
tain  the  national  honor.  The  fields  now  under  culture,  the  houses 
now  existing,  the  mines  now  being  worked,  the  men  we  now  employ, 
cannot  pay  our  debt.  To  meet  its  annual  interest  by  taxing  our 
present  population  and  developed  resources  would  be  to  continue  an 
ever-enduring  burden. 

"  The  principal  of  the  debt  must  be  paid  ;  but  as  it  was  contracted 
for  posterity  its  extinguishment  should  not  impoverish  those  who 
sustained  the  burdens  of  the  war.  I  am  not  anxious  to  reduce  the 
total  of  our  debt,  and  would  in  this  respect  follow  the  example  cf 
England,  and  as  its  amount  has  been  fixed,  would  not  for  the  present 
trouble  myself  about  its  aggregate  except  to  prevent  its  increase. 
My  anxiety  is  that  the  taxes  it  involves  shall  lie  as  little  oppressive  as 
possible,  and  be  so  adjusted  that  while  defending  our  industry  against 
foreign  assault,  they  may  add  nothing  to  the  cost  of  those  necessaries 
of  life  which  we  cannot  produce,  and  for  which  we  must  therefore 
look  to  other  lands.  The  raw  materials  entering  into  our  manufac 
tures^  ivhich  we  are  yet  unable  to  produce,  but  on  which  we  unwisely 
impose  duties,  I  would  put  into  the  free  list  with  tea,  coffee,  and  other 
such  purely  foreign  essentials  of  life,  and  would  impose  duties  on 
commodities  that  compete  with  American  productions,  so  as  to  pro 
tect  every  feeble  or  infant  branch  of  industry  and  quicken  those  that 
are  robust.  I  would  thus  cheapen  the  elements  of  life  and  enable 
those  ivhose  capital  is  embarked  in  any  branch  of  production  to  offer 
such  wages  to  the  skilled  workmen  of  all  lands  as  would  steadily  and 
rapidly  increase  our  numbers,  and,  as  is  always  the  case  in  the 
neighborhood  of  growing  cities  or  towns  of  considerable  extent,  in 
crease  the  return  for  farm  labor  ;  this  policy  would  open  new  mines 
and  quarries,  build  new  furnaces,  forges,  and  factories,  and  rapidly 
increase  the  taxable  property  and  taxable  inhabitants  of  the  country. 

"  Let  us  pursue  for  twenty  years  the  sound  national  policy  of  pro 
tection,  and  we  will  double  our  population  and  more  than  quadruple 
our  capital  and  reduce  our  indebtedness  per  capita  and  per  acre  to 
little  more  than  a  nominal  sum.  Thus  each  man  can  '  without 
moneys'  pay  the  bulk  of  his  portion  of  the  debt  by  blessing  others 
with  the  ability  to  bear  an  honorable  burden." 

My  views  on  these  points  have  undergone  no  change, 
and  I  cannot  more  aptly  describe  the  bill  before  the  com- 
mittee,  in  general  terms,  than  I  thus  did  more  than  four 
years  ago. 

THE  DEFECTS  OF  THE  PRESENT  TARIFF,  AND  THE  REMEDIES 
SUGGESTED   BY   THE   NEW   BILL. 

Why  not  maintain  the  existing  tariff,  and  wherein  does 
the  bill  submitted  by  the  Committee  of  Ways  and  Means 
differ  from  it  ?  Several  gentlemen  have  propounded  these 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION.       377 

questions,  and  I  now  propose  to  answer  them  briefly  and 
rapidly.  The  existing  law  is  crude  and  contains  many 
incongruous  provisions.  It  is  not  in  accord  with  the  theory 
of  the  free-trader  or  the  protectionist.  It  imposes  the  heaviest 
duties  on  articles  of  common  consumption  that  we  cannot 
produce.  Thus,  on  chalk,  not  a  cubic  inch  of  which  has,  so 
far  as  I  have  heard,  been  discovered  in  our  country,  it  impo 
ses  a  duty  of  833J  per  cent.  It  is  bought  at  from  75  cents  to 
$1  50  per  ton,  and  the  duty  is  $10.  This  onerous  duty  is 
not  protective.  We  have  no  chalk-fields,  and  produce  no 
substitute  for  it.  It  is  therefore  simply  a  tax,  and  one 
that  everybody  feels  ;  the  boy  at  his  game  of  marbles,  or 
before  the  blackboard  in  school,  the  housewife  when  she 
cleans  her  silver  or  britannia  ware,  and  the  farmer  in  the 
cost  of  putty  for  his  windows.  The  new  bill  puts  chalk 
on  the  free  list. 

Mr.  Allison.  Have  we  not  increased  the  duty  on  putty, 
which  enters  into  use  in  the  house  of  every  citizen  in  the 
land  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.  Yes,  sir ;  and  why  did  we  do  it  ?  All  our 
western  farmers  are  raising  wheat,  and  many  of  them  can 
find  no  market  for  their  crop,  and  this  bill,  it  is  hoped, 
will,  if  it  become  a  law,  induce  some  of  them  to  produce 
other  things.  We  import  immense  amounts  of  linseed 
and  castor-oil,  and  the  majority  of  the  committee  hoped 
that  by  raising  the  duty  on  these  oils,  and  those  which 
may  be  substituted  for  them,  it  would  induce  some  of  them  to 
raise  flax  and  manufacture  the  oil.  Again,  we  import  great 
quantities  of  goods  made  of  flax  and  substitutes  for  it,  and 
we  hoped  that  better  duties  on  the  oil  and  on  these  fabrics 
might  lead  to  the  establishment  of  linen  and  other  mills  in 
the  interior.  And  as  linseed-oil  is  the  ingredient  of  chief 
value  in  putty,  we  raised  the  duty  on  it  to  correspond  with 
that  on  oil.  We  hope  thus  to  secure  to  every  citizen  good 
and  cheap  putty,  made  of  free  chalk  and  American-grown 
oil. 


THE  ALLEGATION  THAT  WE   PROTECT   OUR   MANUFACTURES 
BY  DUTIES  AVERAGING  FORTY  PER  CENT.  IS  NOT  TRUE. 

Mr.  Chairman,  I  desire  to  call  attention  to  the  unfair 
ness,  unintentional  of  course,  of  the  statement  of  the  gen 
tleman  from  New  York  [Mr.  Brooks]  that  the  existing 
tariff  gives  protection  equal  to  an  average  of  41.2  per 


378        FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED    PROTECTION. 

cent.  That  is  the  percentage  of  duties  on  the  aggregate 
of  our  imports,  and  he  will  hardly  claim  that  the  duty  of 
over  833  per  cent,  on  chalk  is  protective  of  any  of  our 
industries. 

Again,  we  collect  a  duty  of  300  per  cent,  on  pepper. 
Why  should  black  pepper  pay  300  per  cent  ?  Do  we  grow 
it  anywhere  in  this  country  ?  Is  this  duty  protective  of 
any  of  our  industries  ?  You  pay  5  cents  a  pound  for 
pepper  and  the  tariff  imposes  a  duty  of  15  cents,  gold, 
equal  to  300  per  cent.,  and  the  gentleman  includes  this  in 
his  average  of  protective  duties.  Do  we  grow  cloves  or 
clove-steins  in  any  part  of  the  country?  Is  the  duty  on 
them  protective  ?  It  is  on  cloves  355  per  cent,  and  on 
clove-stems  386  per  cent.,  and  yet  the  gentleman  also  in 
cludes  these  with  his  protective  duties.  I  think  gentlemen 
perceive  by  this  time  what  I  meant  when  I  said  that  many 
of  the  provisions  of  the  present  tariff  are  incongruous. 
While  many  of  them  are  high  enough  for  protection  they 
are  countervailed  by  higher  duties  on  raw  materials  that 
we  cannot  produce,  and  which  rival  nations  admit  free 
or  under  very  low  duties. 

I  shall  not  attempt  to  bring  all  such  incongruities  to  the 
attention  of  the  committee,  but  beg  leave  to  allude  to  a 
few  more.  On  cayenne  pepper,  the  duty  is  303  per  cent. ; 
on  allspice,  376J  per  cent. ;  on  nutmegs,  188J  per  cent. ; 
on  crude  camphor,  113  per  cent.;  on  saltpetre,  77f  per 
cent. ;  on  varnish  gums,  none  of  which  are  produced  in 
this  country,  80  per  cent. ;  on  tea,  the  farmer's  and  laborer's 
refreshing  drink,  78 J  per  cent. ;  on  coffee,  47J  per  cent.  I 
could  largely  extend  this  list  of  duties,  each  of  which  is  a  tax 
on  some  article  of  common  consumption  not  produced  in 
the  country,  and  to  that  extent  a  bonus  to  our  competitors. 
I  am  in  favor  of  making  all  such  articles  free ;  and  the 
committee  has  reduced  the  duties  on  them  or  put  them 
on  the  free  list.  When  these  provisions  shall  be  enacted  into 
law  the  gentleman  from  New  York  can  calculate  the  per 
centage  and  find  that  our  duties  will  compare  favorably 
with  those  imposed  by  any  manufacturing  nation  except 
England  ;  whose  brief  trial  of  free  trade  has  cost  her  her 
supremacy.* 

*•  "  The  operatives  have  seen  other  classes  of  the  community  profiting  by  this 
policy  and  increasing  in  wealth,  whilst  they  have  been  going  steadily  down  hill : 
they  have  seen  the  operatives  of  Belgium,  France,  Germnny,  Switzerland, 
America  advance  in  prosperity,  in  intelligence,  ia  technical  education,  far  more 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION.       379 
DUTIES   WHICH   NEED    READJUSTMENT. 

Another  serious  fault  of  the  existing  law  is  that  so 
many  of  its  duties  are  ad  valorem.  Dishonest  men  take 
advantage  of  this  and  have  goods  invoiced  below  the 
proper  value,  and  thus  not  only  defraud  the  Government, 
but  do  wrong  to  both  the  home  manufacturer  and  the 
honest  importer.  This  system  of  duties  has  much  to  do 
with  the  decline  of  American  commerce.  The  large 
temptation  to  defraud  the  Government  by  undervaluation 
has  caused  great  houses  abroad  to  establish  agencies  here 
and  to  refuse  to  sell  directly  to  an  American  purchaser. 
This  is  so  with  all  the  Sheffield  steel-makers  and  most  of 
the  continental  silk  houses.  In  this  way  the  frauds  of  the 
steel-makers  and  silk  manufacturers  have  been  enormous, 
amounting  to  many  millions  of  dollars.  The  new  bill 
substitutes  specific  duties  wherever  it  is  practicable. 

The  duties  now  collected  on  alcoholic  preparations,  and 
those  in  the  production  of  which  spirits  are  used,  such  as 
quinine,  chloroform,  collodion,  etc.,  are  now  much  too 
high,  having  been  adjusted  to  the  tax  of  $2  per  gallon  on 
distilled  spirits.  The  new  bill  adjusts  them  to  the  lower 
tax  now  collected. 

Many  of  the  existing  duties  are  so  high  as  to  defeat  all 
their  legitimate  objects  and  deprive  the  Government  of 
all  revenue.  This  is  especially  true  of  spices.  It  was  in 
evidence  from  many  sources  that  these  are  imported  into 
New  York  or  San  Francisco  and  immediately  shipped  in 

under  a  closely  Protective  Policy,  than  they  have  done  under  what  is  called 
Free  Trade.  They  find  that  far  from  having  maintained  the  lead  that  they  had 
twenty  years  ago,  in  a  vast  number  of  manufactures,  they  have  lost  it,  and  been 
distanced  by  those  whom  their  advisers  told  them  were  withering  under  the  cold 
shade  of  protection. 

"  Twenty  years  ago  free  trade  was  the  cure  propounded  for  all  the  diseases  the 
country  suffered  from;  want  of  work,  pauperism,  crime,  drunkenness,  ignorance, 
were  all  to  diminish  under  the  new  era;  they  have  all  increased;  when  we  look 
at  the  result  of  the  cure  we  have  tried,  can  it  be  a  matter  of  surprise  if  many 
of  us  still  prefer  the  disease  !  We  are  told  free  trade  principles  are  spreading  ; 
why,  in  Prussia,  Austria,  Belgium,  Switzerland,  the  idea  even  of  opening  their 
ports  and  markets,  and  inviting  competition  with  their  own  industrial  popula 
tion,  has  never  yet  been  mooted;  whilst  in  America,  the  operative's  paradise, 
the  duties  on  many  British  manufactures  have  been  doubled  during  the  last  few 
years,  and  France,  the  promised  land  of  free  trade,  is  already  trying  to  withdraw 
the  nominal  facilities  doled  out  to  us  in  the  commercial  treaty.  The  only  man 
in  France  who  is  at  heart  a  free  trader,  is  the  Emperor  himself.  Is  this  hopeful 
for  the  operative  classes  in  England?  Does  the  direction  of  public  opinion  in 
one  single  country  on  this  subject  afford  the  slightest  hope  that  any  one  of  them 
will  admit  our  manufactures  duty  free?  On  the  contrary,  protection  to  native 
industry  is  more  firmly  established  as  a  great  univers.-il  rule  of  internal  polity 
than  any  other,  and  wherever  democratic  principles  extend  this  principle  will 
intensify." — Sir  Edward  Sullivan. 


380 

bond  to  the  British  provinces,  whence  they  are  smuggled 
back.  The  bill  of  the  committee  proposes  such  reductions 
of  the  duties  as  will  probably  give  the  Government  a 
handsome  revenue  while  cheapening  them  to  the  consumer. 
The  value  to  the  country  of  the  changes  proposed  can 
not  fail  to  be  very  great. 


OVEKTHROWN. 

Would  that  I  could  impress  upon  the  House  my  esti 
mate  of  the  value  to  the  country  of  these  proposed  changes. 

I  am  discussing  the  bill  in  no  spirit  of  partisanship.  In 
urging  its  acceptance  I  am  pleading  the  cause  of  the  farmer 
and  laborer,  as  I  conscientiously  believe  that  it  will,  if 
adopted,  increase  the  purchasing  power,  the  exchangeable 
value  of  every  bushel  of  grain  grown  and  hour  of  labor 
performed  in  our  country.  I  have  no  general  condemna 
tion  for  the  existing  law.  It  needs  revision,  but  should 
not  be  overthrown.  As  a  revenue  measure  it  has  ex 
ceeded  the  anticipations  of  its  friends  and  the  most  earnest 
friends  of  the  Government.  It  yielded  for  the  year  end 
ing  June  30,  1867,  $176,417,810  ;  for  that  ending  June 
30,  1868,  $164,464,599  56;  and  for  that  ending  June  30, 
1869,  $180,084,456  63  ;  and  no  preceding  tariff  produced 
results  comparable  to  these. 

And,  sir,  notwithstanding  its  faults  it  has  been  of  great 
value  as  a  protective  measure.  By  its  protective  in 
fluence  it  has  added  much  to  the  power  of  the  country  and 
the  prosperity  of  the  people.  Under  it  our  production  of 
pig-iron  has,  as  I  have  already  shown,  been  more  than 
doubled,  and  its  production  has  been  extended  into  new 
and  large  fields  in  States  where  it  was  previously  unknown. 
Thus  has  increased  value  been  given  to  all  the  land  in 
those  States  ;  the  increase  being  equal  to  the  addition  of 
the  value  of  the  mineral  lands  to  that  of  the  agricultural 
surface ;  and  more  than  that,  it  has  provided  a  market  in 
the  neighborhood  of  each  furnace,  in  which  articles  can  be 
sold  which  would  not  bear  transportation  to  distant  points 
or  foreign  lands.  The  farmers  of  Iowa  and  Minnesota  now 
produce  for  sale  little  of  anything  else  than  wheat  and 
wool  for  exportation  to  the  seaboard  States.  When  manu 
factories  are  built  or  mines  opened,  villages  spring  up  and 
create  a  market  for  roots,  as  potatoes  and  turnips,  the  pro 
ductions  of  the  garden  and  the  orchard,  and  for  hay,  by  which 
the  western  farmer  will  be  relieved  from  the  necessity  of 


381 

growing  successive  crops  of  wheat  to  the  exhaustion  of 
the  soil.  These  villages  also  afford  a  market  for  lamb, 
veal,  eggs,  and  all  the  thousand  things  that  come  in  as 
subsidiary  sources  of  income  even  to  those  who  farm  on  a 
great  scale.  Thus  have  many  farmers  felt  the  protective 
influence  of  the  existing  tariff,  as  well  as  in  the  stimulus 
it  has  given  to  immigration,  and  the  addition  of  the  mine 
ral  to  the  agricultural  value  of  immense  bodies  of  land  in 
almost  every  State  ;  and  while  endeavoring  to  improve  it 
I  renew  my  protest  against  its  repeal  or  overthrow. 

THE  CAREFUL  CONSIDERATION  THAT   HAS  BEEN   BESTOWED 
UPON   THE   BILL   BY   THE    COMMITTEE. 

Mr.  Chairman  and  gentlemen  of  the  committee,  your 
Committee  of  Ways  and  Means  have  devoted  the  earnest 
labor  of  a  year  to  the  consideration  of  the  revision  of  the 
tariff,  a  duty  you  committed  to  them  by  special  resolution 
of  the  House.  In  the  discharge  of  that  duty  we  have 
traveled  in  great  part  at  our  own  proper  cost,  relieved 
largely  by  the  hospitality  of  railroad,  steamship,  and  other 
transportation  companies,  from  the  rocky  coasts  of  Massa 
chusetts,  and  the  waters  of  its  bay,  along  the  long  coast  of 
California  and  Oregon,  and  over  the  beautiful  waters  of 
Puget  Sound,  the  Willamette  and  the  Columbia  rivers ; 
we  have  listened  to  merchants,  manufacturers,  farmers,  and 
men  of  enterprise,  representing  all  the  interests  of  every 
section  of  the  country ;  and  we  have  been  in  all  respects 
painstaking  and  deliberate  in  our  efforts  to  ascertain  how 
the  existing  provisions  of  the  tariff'  can  be  so  modified  as 
to  yield  the  Government  adequate  revenue,  lighten  the 
burdens  of  the  people,  and  stimulate  all  their  industries 
with  equal  hand.  And  I  conscientiously  believe  that  if 
the  bill  we  have  reported  should  be  adopted  without  an 
amendment,  except  those  the  committee  is  prepared  to 
suggest,  its  quickening  influence  would  be  felt  in  every 
department  of  the  productive  and  commercial  industries 
of  the  country.  It  would  do  much  to  revivify  the  lan 
guishing  shipping  interest.  It  would  give  new  and  grander 
proportions  to  the  market  for  your  agricultural  products. 
It  would  maintain  in  a  healthy  condition  your  manufac 
turing  and  mechanical  establishments,  and  it  would  say  to 
capitalists  here  and  abroad,  "  The  protective  policy  of  the 
country  is  confirmed ;  you  may  safely  embark  in  new  enter 
prises  and  develop  new  elements  of  the  illimitable  store  and 
varieties  of  wealth  now  lying  dormant  within  the  country." 


382      FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,  NEED    PROTECTION". 
HOW   IT  WILL    STIMULATE    THE    SHIPPING    INTEREST. 

Do  gentlemen  ask  how  it  will  quicken  commerce  ?  Let 
them  turn  to  its  free  list.  Our  commerce  is  now  with 
manufacturing  nations  inhabiting  the  grain-growing  and 
metalliferous  regions  of  Europe.  They  produce  every 
thing  we  do  except  cotton,  rice,  tobacco,  and  petroleum  ; 
other  than  these  they  want  but  little  from  us,  unless  war 
or  drought  or  excessive  rain  prevails  over  so  large  a 
section  as  to  materially  diminish  the  grain  crop.  We 
should  cultivate  an  exchange  of  products  with  the  non- 
manufacturing  tropical  or  semi-tropical  countries.  We 
want  their  gums,  spices,  barks,  ivory,  dye-woods,  drugs, 
and  other  productions  which  they  would  gladly  exchange 
for  our  grain,  spirits,  cotton  fabrics,  axes,  hoes,  shovels, 
and  an  infinite  variety  of  our  productions.  These  coun 
tries  are  our  natural  markets,  but  we  have  excluded  our 
selves  from  them  by  those  provisions  of  our  tariff  laws 
which  impose  duties  on  their  exports  which  we  need  as 
raw  materials.  All  other  manufacturing  countries  admit 
their  productions  free,  while  we  impose  duties  on  them 
which,  as  I  have  shown,  are  taxes  upon  ourselves  in  their 
consumption.  But  this  does  a  further  wrong  to  the  ship 
ping  interest  in  this  wise  :  the  London  merchant  gets  their 
productions  in  exchange  for  the  shoddy  cloth,  low-grade 
iron,  and  general  "Brumagen"  wares  of  England,  and 
imports  them  free  of  duty.  He  ships  them  to  us  in  Eng 
lish  steamers,  and  adds  freight  to  his  many  other  profits. 
This  trade  of  right  belongs  to  us,  and  under  the  commit 
tee's  bill  we  will  enjoy  it. 

Let  me  illustrate  by  a  single  example.  The  cost  of 
saltpetre  is  a  question  of  importance  to  every  railroad 
builder,  quarryman,  and  miner,  and  we  ought  to  import 
the  raw  material  for  it  from  two  countries  remote  from 
each  other  and  manufacture  it  more  cheaply  than  we  now 
import  it  through  London  from  India.  The  duties  on 
this  article  are  higher  than  they  should  be,  and  so  appor 
tioned  as  to  discriminate  against  our  labor.  That  on  the 
crude  article  is  25  per  cent,  higher  than  that  on  the  par 
tially  refined,  and  is  at  the  rate  of  77}  per  cent.  They 
are  as  follows :  on  partially  refined  saltpetre,  2  cents  per 
pound ;  on  crude,  2  J  cents,  and  on  refined,  3  cents.  The 
new  bill  removes  the  discrimination  against  ourselves  and 
makes  but  two  grades  of  duty.  It  reduces  that  on  the 
crude  article  to  1J  cent,  and  on  the  refined  to  2J  cents 


FARMERS,    MKCHAXICS,    ETC.,    NEED   PROTECTION.      383 

Bat  while  thus  reducing  the  duty  on  this  important  art 
icle  the  bill  of  the  committee  invites  the  establishment 
of  its  cheaper  manufacture  in  our  midst  and  the  employ 
ment  of  many  ships  in  bringing  us  the  raw  material  in 
equal  proportions  from  Peru  and  Germany. 

If  gentlemen  will  examine  the  free  list  they  will  find 
that  it  embraces  muriate  of  potassa  and  nitrate  of  soda. 
The  latter  is  a  natural  product  of  Peru,  and  the  former 
of  Germany,  and  from  1000  tons  of  each  we  can  produce 
1000  tons  of  saltpetre  cheaper  than  we  can  import  it 
from  India.  This  would  double  the  tonnage  required  for 
the  carrying  of  this  article.  I  have  thus  presented  to  the 
committee  but  one  of  many  illustrations  with  which  I 
might  detain  them  of  the  influence  the  bill  will  if  it  be 
comes  a  law  exercise  upon  our  commerce. 

STEEL   AD  VALOREM. 

I  have  said  that  one  of  the  defects  of  the  present  law 
is  its  frequent  application  of  ad  valorems,  which  open  the 
door  to  great  frauds.  I  turn  for  an  illustration  to  what 
seems  to  be  a  favorite  topic  of  the  gentleman  from  Iowa, 
[Mr.  Allison] — the  article  of  steel.  The  gentleman  said 
the  duty  on  steel  in  ingots,  bars,  sheets,  and  wire  above 
a  certain  thickness  is  2J  cents,  and  that  we  had  raised  it 
to  3J  cents,  while  reducing  the  duty  a  little  on  less  im 
portant  classes  of  steel.  Let  me  state  the  case  fairly.  The 
present  duty  on  ingots,  bars,  sheet,  and  wire  not  less  than 
one  quarter  of  an  inch  in  diameter,  valued  at  7  cents  per 
pound  or  less,  is  2 J-  cents  per  pound  ;  value  7  and  not  above 
11  cents  per  pound,  3  cents  per  pound;  valued  above  11 
cents  per  pound,  3J  cents  per  pound  and  10  per  cent,  ad 
valorem.  The  gentlemen  attempted  to  discredit  the  evi 
dence  which  proves  the  magnitude  of  the  frauds  which 
have  been  persistently  perpetrated  by  the  Sheffield  steel 
makers  for  the  last  twenty  years  under  this  system ;  but 
the  Secretary  of  the  treasury  is  acting  upon  it,  and  is 
largely  increasing  the  revenues  of  the  country  from  steel 
by  requiring  it  to  be  honestly  invoiced. 

Much  evidence,  confirmed  by  the  admission  of  one  of 
the  firms  engaged  in  it,  establishes  the  fact  that  a  combi 
nation  has  existed  among  these  wealthy  Englishmen  to 
sell  no  steel  to  Americans  in  England,  but  to  send  it  to 
agents  in  this  country  for  sale,  and  to  so  undervalue  it 
that  that  which  should  pay  3J  cents  and  10  per  cent,  ad 
valorem  has,  to  the  extent  of  9  pounds  out  of  every  10, 


834:      FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION. 

been  brought  in  at  3  cents,  and  by  the  same  fraudulent 
device  and  conspiracy  the  greater  part  of  that  which  was 
subject  to  a  duty  of  3  cents  has  corne  in  at  2J. 

Thus  the  Government  has  been  defrauded  of  many  mil 
lions  of  revenue.  Now,  what  has  the  committee  done  in 
the  premises  ?  We  have  agreed  to  put  all  steel — that 
which  was  below  and  that  which  was  above,  that  which 
paid  2J  cents  a  pound  and  that  which  paid  5J  cents  a 
pound,  or  3J  cents  and  10  per  cent,  ad  valorem — under  a 
duty  of  3J  cents  per  pound.  We  had  importers  and 
manufacturers  of  steel  and  experts  before  us,  and  they 
agreed  that  there  was  no  conceivable  test  by  which  ex 
aminers  and  inspectors  of  customs  could  distinguish  be 
tween  steel  worth  from  4  to  7  cents  and  that  worth  more 
than  11  cents  a  pound ;  so  that  though  we  may  by  the 
proposed  change  for  a  brief  time  do  some  injustice  to 
those  who  use  low-priced  steel  and  those  who  produce 
high  qualities  of  steel,  we  have  made  a  single  duty,  which 
will  give  us  the  revenue  honestly  due  and  enable  our  steel 
manufacturers  to  live  and  extend  their  works. 

In  my  recent  remarks  on  Mr.  Wells'  report  I  quoted 
the  language  of  the  senior  partner  of  a  steel-making  firm 
in  Sheffield,  England,  in  which  he  admitted  the  fact  of 
undervaluation,  and  declared  that  while  the  law  remains 
as  it  is  the  Government  will  be  defrauded  and  cannot  pre 
vent  it.  Thus  the  honest  men  among  the  English  steel 
makers  implore  us  to  close  the  door  against  fraud  in  which 
they  must  participate,  or  surrender  our  market  to  their 
less  honest  neighbors.  Yet,  for  our  well-devised  effort  to 
do  justice  to  the  Government  and  honest  importers,  we 
are  denounced  as  taxing  the  people  to  build  up  monopolies ! 

The  gentleman  from  Iowa  will  I  am  sure  pardon  me 
for  correcting  a  statement  of  his,  on  which  he  amplified 
somewhat  to-day  touching  steel- manufacturing  in  Pitts- 
burg.  The  statement  he  read  yesterday  was  not  that  her 
steel-makers  were  able  to  compete  with  England  in  1859 ; 
it  was  that  steel-making  in  that  city  first  became  an  assur 
ed  success  in  that  year.  Her  enterprising  men  of  capital 
had  been  for  many  years  and  with  great  loss  renewing 
the  yet  fruitless  experiment.  Man  after  man  and  firm 
after  firm  had  failed.  Steel-works  depreciated  in  value 
and  new  firms  bought  the  stock  and  premises  of  old  ones 
at  reduced  values,  till,  in  1859,  ''an  assured  success  was 
attained."  This  was  the  phrase  the  gentleman  from  Iowa 
used  yesterday  when  he  had  the  paper  before  him. 


FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,  NEED    PROTECTION.      385 
STEPHEN   COLWELL. 

I  am  quite  sure  that  the  gentleman  from  Iowa  would  not 
intentionally  misstate  a  fact.  Nobody  values  him  more  highly 
than  I  do.  He  is  as  earnest  on  his  side  of  this  great  question 
as  I  am  on  mine,  and  we  are  both  of  a  temperament  that  re 
quires  us  to  have  the  figures  before  us  to  prevent  a  certain 
measure  of  exaggeration  in  our  statements.  There  is,  how 
ever,  one  point  on  which  I  am  disposed  to  quarrel  with  him, 
and  that  is  that  he  should  have  assumed  to  have  found  an 
ally  in  my  venerable  friend,  Stephen  Colwell,  and  by  a 
perversion  of  his  language  made  him  seem  to  plead  against 
protection  for  American  labor  when  the  very  words  he 
quoted  were  written  in  its  behalf.  Sir,  Stephen  Col  well's 
life  has  been  devoted  to  his  country.  It  has  been  a  life 
long  labor  of  love  with  him  to  promote  the  development 
of  her  vast  stores  of  wealth  and  the  prosperity  of  her 
farmers  and  laborers.  He  was  the  friend  and  companion 
of  Frederick  List,  the  founder  of  the  German  Zollverein, 
who  was  for  a  few  years  an  exile  from  his  native  land  and 
a  dweller  in  the  then  undeveloped  coal  regions  of  Penn 
sylvania.  After  his  death  Mr.  Colwell  collected  his  writ 
ings  and  found  pleasure  in  editing  them  ;  he  has  also  writ 
ten  and  published  much  in  defence  of  protection  as  a  sure 
means  of  promoting  national  greatness,  cheap  commodities, 
and  the  prosperity  of  the  people ;  and  I  confess  that  I 
was  both  astonished  and  grieved  that  a  portion  of  an  art 
icle  of  Mr.  Colwell's  demanding  the  repeal  of  internal 
taxes,  and  showing  that  they  are  a  bonus  to  foreign  manu 
facturers  and  a  burden  upon  our  home  producers,  should 
be  quoted  by  the  gentleman  from  Iowa  against  the  tariff 
bill,  and  to  prove  that  protective  duties  add  to  the  cost  of 
commodities.  I  know  my  friend  did  not  think  of  the 
wrong  he  was  doing,  but  it  is  not  just  to  my  venerable 
friend,  whose  life  is  drawing  to  a  close,  that  his  language 
should  be  thus  perverted  before  the  nation  whose  interests 
he  has  done  so  much  to  promote. 

THE    CLASSIFICATION"   OF   IRON   NOT   NEW. 

But  the  gentleman  from  Iowa  asks  why  the  classification 
of  iron  found  in  the  bill  was  adopted  by  the  committee. 
I  will  tell  him  why.  Sir,  so  far  as  the  classification  of  iron 
has  been  modified,  and  the  changes  are  but  few,  we  adopted 
the  expressed  opinion  of  the  Senate  and  a  former  Com 
mittee  of  Ways  and  Means. 
25 


386      FARMERS,    MECHANICS,    ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION. 

The  Senate  of  the  United  States,  on  the  31st  of  January, 
1867,  passed  a  tariff  bill.  On  the  18th  of  February  of 
that  year  the  Committee  of  Ways  and  Means  reported  it 
to  this  House  with  certain  amendments ;  and  your  commit 
tee,  finding  a  classification  indorsed  by  the  Senate  and 
former  Committee  of  Ways  and  Means,  followed  it,  except 
where  they  thought  change  necessary  or  judicious.  This 
is  the  classification  of  which  the  gentleman  complains  as 
novel  and  artful. 

I  am  too  weary,  and  too  much  exhausted,  and  your 
patience  is  too  far  gone  for  me  to  proceed  further  with  the 
discussion  at  present.  There  are  points  I  would  like  to 
consider ;  but  I  must  draw  rapidly  to  a  conclusion. 

PROOF   THAT  PROTECTION   CHEAPENS   GOODS. 

The  gentleman  from  Indiana  [Mr.  Kerr],  speaking  of 
my  argument  on  Bessemer  rails,  said  that  as  America  pro 
duced  but  30,000  tons  per  annum,  the  establishment  of 
her  works  could  have  had  no  influence  upon  the  price  of 
English  rails,  because  the  quantity  produced  was  relatively 
so  small.  I  propose  to  illustrate  the  fallacy  of  that  argu 
ment  by  the  contents  of  the  little  box  I  hold  in  my  hand. 
So  long  as  America  was  unprepared  to  make  Bessemer 
steel  no  Englishman  would  sell  a  ton  of  rails  for  less  than 
$150.  I  have  told  the  story  to  the  committee  once,  and 
will  not  now  repeat  the  details.  But  when  in  1865  the 
works  of  Griswold  &  Co.,  at  Troy,  New  York,  and  the 
Freedom  Works,  at  Harrisburg,  Pennsylvania,  were  ready 
to  deliver  Bessemer  rails,  Englishmen  who  had  been  swear 
ing  that  they  could  not  sell  them  at  less  than  $150  a  ton 
immediately  offered  them  at  $130.  And  when  our  works 
increased  from  two  to  six  they  dropped  their  price  down 
to  $100,  and  if  necessary  they  will  drop  it  to  $50,  or 
until  they  force  the  owners  of  our  establishments  to 
abandon  the  production  and  apply  their  premises  and  ma 
chinery  to  some  other  use. 

Their  policy  is  to  crowd  out  our  works ;  or,  as  Lord 
Brougham  advised  in  1815,  just  after  the  close  of  our  war, 
"  to  spend  any  amount  of  money  to  strangle  in  the  cradle 
the  infant  industries,  the  exigencies  of  the  war  had  called 
into  existence  in  the  United  States."  They  will  spend  any 
amount  of  money  to  crowd  out  these  five  or  six  Bessemer 
rail-works,  and  then  put  the  price  up  to  figures  that  will 
be  satisfactory  to  themselves. 

I  said  I  would  illustrate  the  argument  by  the  contents 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION.      387 

of  a  small  box  I  hold  in  my  hand.  It  contains  a  few  very 
small  articles  and  specimens  of  the  material  of  which  they 
are  made.  They  are  gas-tips  of  a  kind  that  till  quite 
lately  were  made  exclusively  in  Germany.  They  then  sold 
in  our  market  at  from  $6  to  §12  per  gross.  I  cannot  tell 
you  whether  this  afforded  so  grand  a  profit  as  Bessemer 
rails  did  at  §150  gold  per  ton.  But,  as  recent  events 
prove,  it  must  have  paid  splendidly.  Since  the  close  of 
the  war  there  has  been  found  in  the  interior  of  Tennessee  a 
deposit  of  talc,  of  which  these  are  specimens  [holding  up 
small  pieces].  This  is  carried  not  in  foreign  ships,  but 
by  our  transportation  companies,  to  Boston,  giving  busi 
ness  to  our  railroad  companies  between  the  heart  of 
Tennessee  and  Massachusetts.  There  Yankee  ingenuity 
converts  the  talc  into  gas-tips  such  as  the  Germans  make, 
which  will  not  corrode,  and  for  which  they  had  the  mo 
nopoly  of  our  market.  These  American  men  have  em 
barked  a  large  capital  in  this  enterprise,  and  employ  many 
people  in  Tennessee  and  Massachusetts.  They  are  busy 
making  these  little  gas-tips  and  creating  a  market  for 
western  grain,  and  converting  newly-arrived  laborers  from 
Europe  into  well-paid  American  workingmen. 

What  effect  has  their  enterprise  had  on  the  price  of  por 
celain  gas-tips?  The  German  manufacturers  who  could 
not  sell  them  for  less  than  $6  to  $12  a  gross,  now  suddenly 
drop  their  price  and  are  flooding  the  market  with  them 
at  $2  a  gross.  At  this  price  they  will  soon  destroy  their 
Yankee  rival  and  regain  their  old  monopoly. 

Now,  are  we  wrong  when  we  say  that  if  anybody  makes 
a  profit  out  of  us  we  prefer  that  it  shall  be  those  who  feed 
on  American  wheat,  wear  American  wool,  give  good  wages 
to  American  workmen,  and  pay  American  taxes, — are,  in  a 
word,  Americans?  The  little  gas-tip  illustrates  the  truth 
that  American  competition  cheapens  small  foreign  com 
modities  quite  as  well  as  the  weightier  article  of  steel 
rails. 

SILK   POPLINS. 

Cases  of  this  kind  are  continually  occurring.  Let  me 
tell  you  of  another  from  away  up  in  the  mountain  coun 
ties  of  New  York,  at  Schoharie.  A  quiet,  unpretending 
citizen,  seeing  that  there  were  a  large  number  of  unem 
ployed  girls  in  and  about  the  village,  made  the  experiment 
of  manufacturing  an  article  in  great  demand  for  ladies' 
dresses,  known  as  silk  poplins.  He  equaled  the  foreign 


388      FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 

goods  in  quality,  was  underselling  them,  and  to  the  extent 
of  his  capacity  to  produce  was  driving  them  out  of  the 
market,  when  by  a  change  in  the  wool  tariff  the  duty  on 
his  goods  was  unintentionally  reduced,  and  the  foreigners 
have  him  at  a  disadvantage;  and  if  we  do  not  pass  this 
bill,  or  give  him  other  relief,  he  must  close  his  factory, 
lose  the  capital  he  has  invested  in  it,  and  scatter  the 
formerly  idle  girls  he  now  employs  at  good  wages. 

These  are  the  facts  of  the  case.  The  wool  bill,  in  order 
to  let  coarse  woolen  goods  in  at  a  low  rate,  provides  that 
when  they  are  over  a  certain  number  of  ounces  to  the 
square  yard  they  shall  come  in  at  40  per  cent.  Poplins 
are  in  considerable  part  of  silk  ;  they  are  finer  and  more 
valuable  than  any  heavy  woolen  goods,  but  the  silk  adds  to 
their  weight,  and  it  has  been  held  that  the  duty  on  them 
has  been  reduced  from  60  to  40  per  cent.  Unless  the  re 
lief  proposed  in  this  bill  be  given,  Mr.  Baar  is  likely  to  be 
ruined  and  his  factory  closed. 

TIN  AND   NICKEL. 

The  present  law  puts  a  duty  of  15  per  cent,  on  tin  in 
pigs  or  bars.  We  produce  no  tin,  though  I  believe  they 
have  recently  discovered  a  bed  of  ore  in  California,  and  it 
is  thought  to  exist  in  Missouri.  I  hope  it  does,  and  that 
both  deposits  may  soon  be  developed.  We  cannot  make 
tin-plates  by  reason  of  the  duties  on  block  tin  and  palm 
oil.  This  bill  of  the  committee  proposes  to  put  palm-oil, 
an  African  product,  and  block  tin  on  the  free  list ;  so  that 
we  may  begin  the  manufacture  of  sheet-tin,  for  which  we 
export  annually  $8,000,000  in  gold. 

While  we  have  no  well-ascertained  deposits  of  tin  ore 
the  country  abounds  in  deposits  of  nickel.  Missouri,  Ken 
tucky,  Virginia,  Pennsylvania,  New  Jersey,  and  Con 
necticut  have  large  deposits  of  it ;  yet  when  the  law  of 
1861  was  passed  its  manufacture  had  not  been  attempted  ; 
and  a  duty  of  15  per  cent.,  the  same  as  that  on  block  tin, 
was  put  on  nickel.  Our  bill  proposes  to  enable  the  men 
of  Missouri  to  work  the  vast  deposits  of  mine  La  Motte ; 
the  men  of  Kentucky  to  work  the  large  deposits  in  that 
State,  and  the  people  of  Connecticut  to  establish  nickel 
works  in  the  immediate  vicinity  of  their  great  factories  of 
Britannia  and  other  white-metal  wares  by  putting  the  same 
rate  of  duty  on  nickel  that  we  have  on  copper,  zinc,  lead, 
iron,  and  other  metals. 


FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  XEED  PROTECTION.       389 
THE    EFFECT   OF   PROTECTING   NICKKL. 

Now  let  me  show  you  what  will  be  the  effect  of  this 
measure.  I  hold  in  my  hand  a  letter  from  Evans  &  Askin, 
the  great  nickel  manufacturers  of  England.  They  tell  us 
how  they  will  punish  us  if  we  increase  the  tariff  on  nickel ; 
and  I  hope  you  will  join  me  in  invoking  their  punishment. 
But  let  them  speak  for  themselves,  as  they  do  in  this 
letter.  It  reads  thus : 

BIRMINGHAM,  March  18,  1868. 

DEAR  SIR  :  Although  it  is  now  some  time  since  we  had  the  pleasure 
of  corresponding  we  hear  from  time  to  time  of  the  progress  you  are 
making  in  the  nickel  trade  in  America,  and  we  trust  you  find  the 
business  a  renumerative  and  successful  one. 

We  hear  that  attempts  are  being  made  to  influence  Congress  to 
increase  largely  the  import  duties  on  refined  nickel,  and  although 
perhaps  we  might  at  first  regret  that  the  duties  should  be  raised, 
we  are  not  quite  sure  it  would  not  ultimately  be  to  our  advantage ; 
for,  if  the  duties  are  so  raised  as  to  render  the  import  of  nickel  al 
most  prohibitory  we  shall  at  once  adopt  measures  to  send  out  one 
of  the  junior  members  of  our  firm  and  erect  a  nickel  refinery  in  the 
States.  In  fact,  from  the  large  quantities  of  nickel  and  cobalt  ores 
offered  to  us  by  mine  La  Motte,  the  Haley  Smelting  Company,  and 
several  others,  we  are  almost  disposed  to  do  so  at  once,  as  we  think 
it  might  answer  our  purpose  better  than  forwarding  the  refined 
article  from  this  country.  We  are  not,  of  course,  selfish  enough  to  wish 
a  monopoly  of  the  nickel  trade  in  America,  but  we  hope  and  intend  to 
have  a  share  of  it.  either  by  shipment  to  or  refining  in  the  States. 

Should  we  decide  upon  erecting  works  in  your  country  may  we  reckon 
on  any  supply  of  ore  from  your  mine,  in  addition  to  other  sources  ? 

We  are,  dear  sir,  yours,  faithfully,  EVANS  &  ASKIN. 

Mr.  JOSEPH  WHARTON. 

Let  them  come  on  with  their  skilled  nickel-makers  ;  let 
them  bring  their  capital  by  millions ;  let  them,  if  they  can, 
bring  100,000  people  to  consume  the  grain  of  Missouri; 
and  we  will  give  them  all  welcome.*  By  increasing  the 
duty  on  nickel  from  15  to  40  per  cent,  mine  La  Motte  will 

*  Capital  owned  in  this  country  is  seeking  investment  in  America.  Our 
capitalists  are  lending  largely  to  the  United  States,  and  enabling  workmen  to 
do  that  in  the  country  to  which  they  have  emigrated  which  was  wont  to  be  done 
in  this  country.  If  labor  in  this  land  keeps  the  incubus  of  which  we  have 
spoken  still  hanging  on  its  neck,  it  is  perfectly  certain  that  it  will  not  be  able 
to  compete  with  younger  nations  in  their  ports;  and  accumulated  wealth,  as 
capital  is,  really  will  find  its  way  out  of  the  country.  Keep  up  an  expenditure 
of  one  hundred  and  fifty  millions  a  year,  at  the  same  time  lessen  production, 
and  it  will  follow,  with  unerring  sureness,  that  we  shall  be  left  dying  of  starva 
tion  in  the  rear  of  other  peoples.  The  ruin  of  a  nation  is  not  a  result  which 
shows  itself  all  at  once.  It  is  the  issue  generally  of  a  comparatively  slow  pro 
cess;  but  it  is  not  the  less  surely,  because  it  is  slowly,  that  a  people  who  send 
off  their  most  industrious  workmen  to  increase  the  forces  of  other  nations  who  are 
already  competing  with  them  for  the  world's  trade,  do  come  to  ruin  by  such  a 
course.  It  should  not  be  forgotten  that  just  the  more  favorable  the  conditions  of 
luhorarein  the  countries  to  which  we  send  out  our  workmen,  just  so  much  the  sooner 
will  our  adversity  come  to  us  from  their  competition. — Social  Politics  ;  Kirk. 


390      FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED  PROTECTION. 

thus  become  a  great  manufacturing  centre,  and  there  will 
be  a  new  market,  not  dependent  on  long  lines  of  railroad 
or  ocean  transportation,  for  the  grain  and  wool  of  the  valley 
of  the  Mississippi. 

Now,  Mr.  Chairman,  in  conclusion,  I  plead  with  the 
gentlemen  of  the  committee  to  forget  their  sectional  feel 
ings,  to  put  aside  party  strife,  to  remember  that  the  glory 
and  the  power  of  their  country  depend  on  the  prosperity, 
intelligence,  and  inspiring  hopes  of  the  laboring  people 
and  their  children.  I  beg  them,  as  I  know  they  all  love 
their  country,  to  stand  by  her  industries,  and  to  aid  the 
poor  and  oppressed  laborers  of  other  lands  to  escape  from 
a  diet  of  "  rye  and  potatoes,"  to  a  land  of  free  schools  and 
liberal  wages,  in  which  the  daily  fare  of  the  family  will  be 
of  wheat,  mutton,  beef,  or  pork,  with  the  vegetables  and 
fruits  of  all  the  States  of  our  broad  and  then  assuredly 
prosperous  country. 


APPENDIX. 

THE    TARIFFS    OF    THE    UNITED    STATES. 

STATEMENT— Showing  the  revenue  collected  each  year,  from  1789  to  1868,  the  amount  of 
dutiable  imports  and  free  goods  imported  annually,  and  the  average  rate  of  duty  on  im 
ports  annually.  It  was  one  of  the  appendices  of  the  last  annual  report  of  the  Special 
Commissioner  of  the  Revenue.  It  is  very  suggestive,  and  to  those  who  remember  the 
financial  condition  of  the  country  from  1837  to  1842,  and  from  1856  to  1861,  the  price  of 
grain  and  the  suffering  endured  by  the  laboring  people  at  all  commercial  and  manufac 
turing  centres  during  those  periods,  will  prove  conclusive  on  many  points : 


DATES. 

TARIFFS. 

CUSTOMS. 

IMPORTS. 

\U 

3* 

9 
10 

9  4 
16 
16 

14 

$ 

12 
10 

25 

11V4 

FREE. 

DUTIABLE. 

TOTAL. 

From  March  4, 
1789,  to  Dec.  31, 
1790  Au°-  10 

1791—  March  3.. 
1792—  May  2  
1793  
1794—  June  7.... 
1795—  Jan.  29... 
1796  
1797—  March  3.. 
1798  

Spirits  
General  

General  

Supplementary. 

General    

$4,399,473  09 
3,443,070  85 
4,255,306  56 
4,801,065  28 
5,588,461  26 
6,567,987  94 
7,549,649  65 
7,106,061  93 
6,610,449  31 
9,080,932  73 
10,750,778  93 
12,458,235  74 
10,479,417  61 

11,098,565  33 
12,936,487  04 
14,667,698  17 
15,845,521  61 
16,363,550  58 
7,296,020  5* 
8,583,309  31 
13,313,222  73 

8.958.777  53 



$62,200,666 
31,500,000 
31,100,000 
34,600,000 
69,756,268 
81,436,164 
75,379.406 
68,551,700 
79,069,148 
91,252,768 
111,363,511 
76,333,333 
64,666,666 

85,000,000 
120,600,000 
129,410,000 
138,500,000 
56,990.000 
59,400,000 
85,400,000 
53,400,000 

77.030,000 

| 





1799  

1800—  March  13 
1801  
1802  

Sugar  and  wines 

1803  
1804—  March  26 

1805—  March  27 

Mediterranean 





Light  money  .... 



J808  
1809  







1810  



1811 

1812—July  1.... 

War,  double  du 
ties  .... 

FARMERS,  MECHANICS,  ETC.,  NEED   PROTECTION.      3',->l 
TABLE—  Continued. 


DATES. 

TARIFFS.         CUSTOMS. 

IMPORTS. 

if 

** 

li 

>5 

J60 

|47 

r 

F 

i 

\*>1A 

!»:? 
128.9 
128.8 
J31.6 
328 
30.7 
35.1 
33.8 
37.1 

40 
35.4 
29 
22.4 
15 
17.2 
16.2 
12.4 
17.3 
15.8 
14.1 
15.6 
16.6 

1:>.7 

26.9 
26.4 
219 
16.2 
20.4 
19.2 
22.3 
22.tf 
22.2 
22 
21.1 
20.3 
20.3 
17.7 
14.8 
14,6 
14.7 

11.2 

17.7 
23.7 
51 
54.2 

10.2 

(28 
(4 
».2 

FREE. 

DUTIABLE.  |       TOTAL. 

1813—  July  13. 
1814  

Salt  

$13,224,624  2i 

5,998,772  Ot 
7,282,942  22 

36,306,874  8? 
26,283  348  49 





$22,005,OOC 
12,965,OOC 
13,041,274 

147,103,000 
99,2oO,00( 
121,750,000 
87,125,000 
74,450,000 
62,585,724 
83,241,541 
77,579,267 
«0,549,007 
96,340,075 
84,974,477 
79,484,068 
88.509,824 
74,492,527 

70,876,920 
103,191,124 
101,029,266 
108,118,311 
126.521,332 
149,895,742 
189,980,035 
140,989,217 
113,717,404 
162,092,132 
107,141,519 
127,946,177 
100,162,0*7 
64,753,799 
108,435,035 
117,254,564 
121,691,797 
146,545,638! 
154,99«,92Si 
147,857,439 
178,138,318] 
216,224,932 
212,945,442 
267,978,647! 
104,562,3811 
261,468,520 
514,639,942 
560,890,141 
282,613,150: 
538,768,130 
562,166,254 

$52,739,387! 

275,446,939| 

252,919,920! 
129,565,134 
248,555,652 

145,512,158 

111,733,309 
573,409,448 
137,026,541; 

.... 
.... 

i  .... 

35.6 
31.7 
32.7 
37.5 
37.1 
34.6 
41.3 
39.3 
44.3 

48.8 
40.8 
33.8 
31.9 
32.6 
36.0 
31.6 
25.3 
37.8 
29.9 
30.4 
32.2 
23.1 
35.7 
35.1 
32.5 
26'X 

&X 

24 
23 
25.2 
2« 
26 
25 
,23.5 
23 

21.5 
20 
19 
19 

18.1 

26.7 
53.2 
57.2 
13.7 

17.06 

17.34 

17.86 
15.48 

1815  

1816—  April  27 
1817  

Min.  for  protec 
tioa  

$i6^082,313 
7,298,708 
9,048,288 
12,563.773 
10,947,510 
12,567,769 
11,855,104 
12,379,176 
11,805,501 

12,746,245 
13,456,625 
14,249,453 
32,447,9.50 
68,393,180 
77,940,493 
92,056,481 
69,250,031 
60,860,005 
76,401,792 
57,196,204 
66,019,731 
30,627,486 
35,574,584 
24,766,881 
22,147,840 
24,767,730 
41,772,636 
22,716,665! 
22,377,6l4j 
22,710,382! 
25,106,587 
29,692,9341 
31,383,534 
33,285.821; 
40,090,336 
56,955.706 
66,729,306i 
80,319,2751 
79,721,116,' 
90,841,749 

"134,559,1961' 

*91,603,491 
44,826,629!' 
*54,244,183i' 

54,329,588 

69,728,618; 

39,  1  05,708  ;I 
29,804,147: 
41,179,172.! 

te^m&ii 

75,242,833 
68,530,979 
67,985,234 
85,392,565 
72,406,708 
67,628,964 
76,130,648 
62,687,026 

58,130,675 
89,734,499 
86,779,813 
75,670,361 
58,128,152 
71,955,249 
97,923,554 
71,739,186 
52,857,399 
85,690,340 
49,945,315 
61,926,446 
69,534,601 
29,179,215 
83,668,154 
95,106,724i 
96,924,05» 
104,773,002 
132,282,325 
125,479,774 
155,427,936! 
191,118,345 
183,252,508; 
236,595,113 
271,276,560) 
221,378,184 
257,684,236' 
294,160,835' 
202.293,875; 
259,047,014 
279,872,327 

218,180,191  ' 

88,845,468 

>08/»93,891| 
275,320,9511: 
94,226,064J 

575,783,640  < 

572.627,601  <• 
543.605,301  , 
595,847,369  - 

1818—  April  20 
1819—  March  3 
1820  

Iron  and  alum 
Wines  

17,176,385.  00 
20,283,608  76 
15,006,612  15 
18,475,703  57 
24,066,066  43 
22,402,024  29 
25,486,817  86 
31,653.871  50 
26,033.861  97 
27,948,956  57 
29,951,251  90 
27,688,701  11 

28,389,505  05 
36,596,118  19 
29,341,175  65 
24,177,578  52 
18,960.705  96 
25,890,726  66 
30,818,327  67 
18,134,131  01 
19,702,825  45 
25,554,533  96 
15,104,790  63 
19,919,492  17 
16,662,746  84 
10,208,000  43 
29,236,357  38 
30,952.416  21 
26,712,668  00 

1821  

1822  

1823  

1824—  May  22.. 
1825  

General  rise..... 

1826  

1827  

1828—  May  19.. 
1829  

Vlin.  extended. 

1830—  May  20.. 
1831  

Coffee,  tea,  mo 
lasses  

1832—  July  14.. 
1833—  March  2. 
1834  

Modifications... 
Compromise  

1835  

1836  

1837  

1838  

1839  

1840  

1841—  Sept.  11.. 
1842—  Aug.  30... 
1843  "  

Free  list  tax  
General  rise  

1844  

1845  

1846—  Aug.  6.... 
1847  . 

leveniie  tariff... 

1848  

31,757,071  00 
2«,346,739  00 
39,668,686  00 
49,017,568  00 
47,339,326  00 
58,931,865  00 
64,224,190  00 
53,025,794  00 
64,022,863  00 
63,875,905  00 
41,789.621  00 
49,565,824  00 
53,187,511  00 

39,582,186  00 

49,056,398  00 
69,059,642  00 
02,316  153  00 
84,92«;260  00 

79,046,630  00 

76,417,811  00 
64,464,599  56 
80,048,426  63 

1849  

1850  

1851         

1852  

1853  

1854  

1855  

1856 

1857—  March  3.. 
1858  

leneral  

1859     

1860              .     .. 

(Mar.   2) 
1861  ^  Aug.  5V 
(Dec  24  j 
1862—  July  14... 
1863—  March  3» 
1864—  June  30.. 
1865—  March  3.. 
(Mar.  14) 
1866^  May  16  V 
(July  28) 
1867—  March  2.J 

186*  
1869—  Feb.  24...I 

General  

eoeral  

Wool  and  wool- 

..'!M..:r.:::::::  : 

Copper  increas'd! 

•  la  theie  amounts  are   included  import*   into  the  southern  ports  during  the  war,  from  which  09 
rereaue  WM  derived,  namely,  in  1861,  $17,0*9 ,234  ;  in  Is62,  |9d,TS9  ;  and  iu  1864,  $2J'.'0. 


THE  VALUE  OF  AN  INEXPOETABLE 
CURRENCY. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
JUNE  STH,  1870. 

The  House  being  in  session — 

Mr.  Kelky  said : 

The  fifteen  minutes  allotted  me  will  not  be  sufficient  to 
enable  me  to  examine  in  detail  the  bill  before  the  House. 
But  I  beg  leave  to  offer  a  few  general  suggestions  on  the 
subject.  In  the  first  place,  permit  me  to  say  that  the 
South  and  West  need  and  ought  to  have  increased  bank 
ing  facilities  and  more  bank  currency.  The  Southern 
States  have,  if  my  memory  is  not  at  fault,  but  about  two 
per  cent.,  and  the  Southwestern  States  but  about  two  and 
three-quarters  per  cent,  of  the  national  banking  capital. 
They  are  entitled  to  more;  and,  in  my  judgment,  it  would 
be  vastly  to  the  benefit  of  the  country  if  they  could  have 
considerably  more. 

Banks  are  found  to  be  a  convenience  in  New  England, 
New  York,  Pennsylvania,  and  elsewhere,  and  their  increase 
would  promote  the  convenience  of  the  people  of  the  West 
ern  and  Southern  States.  They  would  facilitate  the 
development  of  the  country,  and  promote  its  local  trade 
and  the  forwarding  of  the  crops.  If  the  bill  before  the 
House  contained  but  the  first  section,  providing  for  the 
creation  of  $95,000,000  of  banking  capital  in  addition  to 
the  amount  the  country  now  possesses,  with  provisions 
subjecting  it  to  the  general  banking  law,  and  requiring  it 
to  have  as  its  basis  a  deposit  of  the  bonds  of  the  Govern 
ment  now  extant  or  those  hereafter  to  be  issued,  and  limit 
ing  its  distribution  to  those  States  which  have  not  a  proper 
proportion,  I  would  vote  for  it. 

But  I  cannot  sustain  this  bill ;  it  proposes  to  construct 
an  inverted  pyramid  ;  and  I  do  not  believe  a  thing  of  that 
form  can  be  made  to  stand.  The  base  ought  to  be  broader 
than  the  apex  and  not  narrower.  The  bill  proposes  to 
withdraw  from  the  existing  reserve  of  the  banks  the  three 
per  cent,  certificates  held  by  them  and  nearly  fifty  million 
392 


VALUE  OF  AX  1NEXFORTABLE  CUKRENCY.    393 

dollars  of  greenbacks,  and  to  issue  $95,000,000  more 
national  bank  notes.  This  in  itself  would  be  a  perceptible 
contraction.  But  the  new  banks  in  cities  are  required  to 
hold  a  reserve  equal  to  twenty-five  per  cent,  of  their  cir 
culation,  and  in  the  country  fifteen  per  cent.  These  must 
necessarily  consist  of  greenbacks.  The  effect  would  there 
fore  be  a  contraction  that  would  be  felt  by  every  bank  and 
business  man  in  the  country. 

Now,  let  me  say  with  emphasis,  in  reply  to  gentlemen 
who  maintain  the  opposite  theory,  that  contraction  is  not 
the  road  to  resumption,  but  rather  to  bankruptcy.  Every 
$100,000  of  your  currency  that  you  contract  restrains  the 
business,  retards  the  development  of  the  resources  and 
diminishes  the  profits  of  the  country.  Gentlemen  ask, 
how  will  you  achieve  resumption  if  you  permit  an  expan 
sion  of  bank  paper  ?  Sir,  I  do  not  wish  to  attempt  the 
impossible.  I  am  not  anxious  to  resume  specie  payments 
until  the  commercial  relations  of  our  country  shall  have 
improved.  Few  greater  misfortunes  could  happen  us  than 
that  under  some  impulse  we  should  attempt  resumption 
before  the  balance  of  trade  shall  be  in  favor  of  our  country 
and  large  amounts  of  our  bonds  shall  have  been  brought 
home  from  abroad. 

We  owe  $1,000,000,000  of  overdue  debt  to  Europe.  It 
is  not  overdue  from  the  Government,  but  from  the  people 
of  the  country.  Our  five-twenty  bonds  have  not  yet  ma 
tured.  But  if  we  should  resume  specie  payments,  and 
tempt  the  caprice  or  the  cupidity  of  bankers,  merchants, 
or  manufacturers  abroad  to  bring  us  to  bankruptcy,  all  they 
would  have  to  do  would  be  to  send  ten,  fifteen  or  twenty 
million  dollars  of  bonds  home,  to  be  sold  at  market  rates, 
by  which  they  would  make  a  profit  on  their  original  invest 
ment  and  draw  the  purchase-money  from  us  in  gold. 

Sir,  in  view  of  our  vast  foreign  indebtedness,  our  safety 
is  in  the  fact  that  we  conduct  our  domestic  exchanges  with 
a  non-exportable  currency.  The  gentleman  from  Illinois 
[Mr.  Ingersoll]  reminded  us  this  morning  of  the  fact  that 
in  1857,  when  our  banks  were  on  a  specie  basis  and  con 
ducted  their  business  by  specie  payments,  the  draft  of  $7,- 
000,000  of  gold  for  Europe  was  the  proximate  cause  of 
the  great  financial  crisis  of  that  year.  And  if,  with  our 
immense  debt  abroad  and  the  balance  of  trade  against  us 
heavily  as  it  is,  we  were  to  resume,  the  unexpected  draft 
by  our  creditors  of  from  seven  to  ten  million  dollars  would 


394    VALUE  OF  AN  INEXPORTABLE  CURRENCY. 

bring  us  to  suspension  and  widespread  commercial  bank- 
ruptcy.* 

Let  me  contrast  the  financial  history  of  1866  with  that 
of  1857.  In  1866  gold  did  not  enter  into  our  currency  ; 
it  was  a  commodity.  We  were  using  a  kind  of  money 
which  you  could  not,  according  to  the  idea  of  the  gentle 
man  from  Ohio  [Mr.  Garfield],  put  into  the  melting  pot 
and  after  heating  it  to  red  heat  find  that  it  retained  its 
original  value.  We  were  dealing  exclusively  with  paper 
money.  The  precious  metals  constituted  no  part  of  our 
circulating  medium.  Yet  in  the  month  of  May  in  that 
year  England  drew  from  us  more  than  three  times  the 
sum  that  had  produced  the  suspension  in  1857.  She  took 
from  us  in  the  month  of  May,  1866,  $23,744,194  ;  in  June, 
$15,890,956  more;  and  in  July,  $5,821,459  more.  Yet 
we  sustained  the  draft  in  three  successive  months — one 
quarter  of  the  year  1866— of  $45,456,609  in  gold,  and  it 
created  not  a  ripple  in  our  immense,  complicated  and 
profitable  domestic  trade.f  No  bank  failed,  no  leading 
house  suspended,  no  railroad  company  was  embarrassed. 
The  business  of  the  country  went  on  growing  and  prosper 
ing  as  though  no  collapse  had  occurred  in  England,  and 
no  draft  had  been  made  on  us.  Why  was  it  ?  It  was,  as 
[  have  said,  because  our  money  was  non-exportable  ;  and 
unable  to  cripple  us  by  contracting  our  currency,  our 
creditor  satisfied  himself  with  taking  a  supply  of  one  of 
the  productions  of  the  country.  It  was,  as  the  gentleman 
from  Ohio  [Mr.  Garfield],  the  learned  chairman  of  the 
committee,  has  said,  because  our  money  is  as  national  as 
our  flag.  It  is  money  wherever  that  flag  floats  supreme  ; 
it  is  money  for  all  the  purposes  of  the  countless  domestic 
exchanges  between  our  citizens  over  all  our  broad  land 
and  in  no  other. 

Mr.  Garfield,  of  Ohio.  How  is  it  when  it  floats  on  the  sea? 

Mr.  Kelley.  It  is  still  money.  When  it  floats  under  our  flag 
on  the  sea  it  settles  the  seamen's  wages  and  the  pay  of  the 
officers.  Beyond  the  sea,  in  foreign  lands,  it  fortunately  is 
not  money:  but,  sir,  when  have  we  had  such  a  long  and  un 
broken  career  of  prosperity  in  business  as  since  we  adopted 
this  non-exportable  currency  ?  When  we  were  paying 
specie  we  had,  at  almost  regular  intervals  of  about  seven 

*  This  would  have  been  accomplished,  beyond  a  peradventure,  within  the 
eixty  days  immediately  following  the  utterance  of  these  words,  by  reason  of  a 
net  loss  of  the  precious  metals,  by  export,  in  July  1870,  of  $17,313,763  conse 
quent  upon  the  declaration  of  war  between  France  and  Germany. 

f  Sec  statement  in  regard  to  the  exports  of  the  precious  metals  for  the  fiscal 
year  1870-71,  note,  p.  132,  ante. 


VALUE  OF  AN  IXEXPORTABLE  CURRENCY.    395 

years,  crises  that  extended  from  one  end  of  the  country  to 
the  other,  prostrating  every  branch  of  our  internal  trade 
and  productive  industry,  and  affecting  our  foreign  com 
merce.  These  financial  revulsions  were  brought  about 
whenever  the  debtor  nation  needed  money,  as  was  the  case 
in  1857.  So  it  would  be  again  with  $1,000,000,000  of 
over-due  indebtedness  and  the  balance  of  trade  heavily 
against  us  every  year,  if  we  should  be  tempted  or  forced 
by  artificial  means  into  the  resumption  of  specie  payments. 
Kesumption,  under  existing  circumstances,  would  be  sheer 
madness.  It  would  doom  many  of  the  enterprising  men 
of  this  generation  who  by  their  energy  are  adding  to  the 
wealth  and  power  of  the  country  to  struggle  for  the  re 
mainder  of  their  lives  in  poverty,  or  to  escape  from  har 
assing  creditors  through  the  provisions  of  the  bankrupt 
law. 

I  am  not  an  expansionist,  but  I  do  not  fear  a  slight  ex 
pansion.  The  volume  of  currency  does  not,  as  is  so  often 
asserted,  regulate  the  price  of  commodities.  We  have  as 
much  currency  to-day  as  we  had  in  1866.  It  is  true  that 
some  compound-interest  notes  were  then  held  by  the  banks 
as  reserve  ;  it  is  true  that  more  of  the  three  per  cent,  cer 
tificates  were  then  held  as  reserve,  which  have  been  ex 
tinguished.  But  let  me  also  call  attention  to  the  fact  that 
during  last  year  and  the  latter  part  of  the  preceding  year 
and  the  months  that  have  passed  of  the  present  year,  our 
receipt  of  foreign  gold  has  increased,  our  production  has 
been  large,  and  the  shipments  of  specie  have  been  much 
diminished  ;  and  that  as  this  also  enters  into  the  bank 
reserve  we  have  probably  as  great  or  a  greater  volume  of 
currency  than  we  had  in  1866. 

But  how  have  prices  been  affected  ?  Are  they  as  high 
as  they  then  were  ?  No,  sir.  I  ask  gentlemen  from  the 
West  how  the  price  of  wheat  compares  to-day  with  the 
price  in  1866?  I  ask  gentlemen  from  New  England  how 
the  prices  of  cotton  and  woolen  goods  compare  with  those 
of  1866  ?  You  can  now  buy  cotton  and  woolen  goods  of 
almost  every  form  and  character  for  currency  at  as  low 
prices  as  you  could  buy  them  for  gold  in  1860,  and  for 
much  less  than  you  could  in  1866.  You  can  buy  wheat 
at  prices  corresponding  with  those  of  the  period  before 
the  war.  But  in  1866  wheat  commanded  double  its 
present  price;  and  the  special  Commissioner  of  Revenue 
delighted  in  holding  up  the  high  price  of  cotton  and  woolen 
goods  and  attributing  it  to  the  expanded  condition  of  the 


396    VALUE  OF  AN  INEXPORTABLE  CURRENCY. 

currency.  It  was  also  the  delight  of  Secretary  McCullough 
to  set  forth  in  his  annual  reports  the  effect  of  the  inflated 
currency  upon  the  prices  of  various  commodities.  There 
is  scarcely  an  American  product  save  beef  and  pork  that 
is  not  as  cheap  now  as  it  was  in  1860,  and  which  is  not 
vastly  lower  in  price  than  it  was  under  the  same  volume 
of  currency  in  1866,  and  the  price  of  beef  and  pork  comes 
fJown  each  year,  as  the  destruction  the  war  made  of  breed 
ing  stock  is  repaired. 

1  hope  that  this  bill  will  be  recommitted,  with  instruc 
tions  to  the  committee  to  report  a  bill  extending  the 
banking  system  through  the  South  and  West,  to  the  extent 
of  from  seventy-five  to  ninety  million  dollars,  under  the 
general  provisions  of  the  banking  law,  and  providing  that 
the  bonds  deposited  as  the  basis  of  the  circulation  shall  be 
those  already  in  existence  or  hereafter  to  be  issued  by  the 
Government.  I  believe  such  a  measure  would  stimulate 
every  industry,  and  that  with  such  a  measure  carried  out, 
some  of  the  banks  east  of  the  Hudson  might  be  willing  to 
surrender  either  their  charters  or  their  currency.  It  would 
accomplish  at  any  rattan  equalization  of  banking  facilities 
without  a  sudden  or  .violent  disturbance.  It  could  injure 
no  section  of  the  country  ;  it  would  benefit  all  its  parts 
and  people. 

Sir,  look  at  the  present  condition  of  California.  I  hold 
her  up  as  an  illustration  of  the  point  I  am  making,  that 
an  adequate  volume  of  currency  is  essential  to  the  employ 
ment  of  the  people  and  the  development  of  the  country. 
With  all  the  resources  of  that  region,  the  like  of  which  are 
not  to  be  found  upon  the  face  of  the  earth,  her  working- 
people,  to  the  number  of  thousands,  are  idle.  They  con* 
gregate  in  the  streets  of  San  Francisco  and  other  cities  in 
want  and  idleness.  Why  ?  Not  because  there  are  not 
adequate  and  profitable  fields  for  their  employment,  but 
because  there  is  not  currency  enough  in  California,  which 
rejects  paper  money,  to  enable  men  of  enterprise  to  engage 
in  new  undertakings.  Using  nothing  but  gold  as  a  cur 
rency,  they  restrain  in  equal  degree  their  enterprise  and 
the  development  of  the  resources  of  their  State.  As  well 
might  gentlemen  maintain  that  no  more  than  a  fixed 
number  of  pound  weights  or  yard  sticks  should  be  used 
as  that  no  more  than  a  fixed  number  of  dollars  should  be 
permitted  to  exist.  Each  of  them  is  but  a  convenient 
instrument  of  trade,  for  the  want  of  an  adequate  supply  of 
which  the  public  must  suffer. 


JUDGE     KELLEY'S    ACCEPTANCE 

OF   THE  NOMINATION  FOR  CONGRESS. 

ON  Saturday,  July  2d,1870,  Messrs.  James  Niell.William  Sellers,  A. 
M.  Eastwick,  John  Dobson,  A.  Hanline,  B.  T.  Roberts,  and  William 
Matthews,  the  committee  appointed  at  the  late  Republican  Con 
gressional  Convention  of  the  Fourth  District,  visited  Judge  Kelley 
at  his  residence,  and  informed  him  of  his  renomination  to  Congress. 

Mr.  Niell,  Chairman  of  the  committee,  addressed  him  as  follows  : 

"  We  meet  you  to  discharge  a  duty  committed  to  us  by  the  Con 
vention  of  Congressional  Delegates  of  the  Fourth  District,  held  June 
15,  that  of  tendering  to  you  (now  for  the  sixth  time)  the  nomination 
as  their  representative  in  Congress,  and  also  of  presenting  a  series 
of  resolutions,  which  not  only  convey  the  high  estimate  your  consti 
tuents  put  upon  your  public  services,  but  endorse  the  manly  position 
assumed  by  you  in  your  letter  of  March  8th,  now  known  through 
out  the  country.* 

"  In  making  you  this  tender  we  frankly  confess  to  have  been  gov 
erned  by  selfish  motives.  To  decline  it,  we  are  well  aware,  would  be 
to  secure  to  yourself  more  ease,  larger  remuneration  for  your  valu 
able  labors,  as  well  as  exemption  from  a  thousand  perplexities 
incident  to  your  present  position,  but  for  your  constituents  it 
would  be  an  irreparable  loss.  To  you  they  look,  as  heretofore,  for 

*  The  letter  referred  to  was  a  protest  against  certain  evils  which  from  long 
practice  had  the  apparent  sanction  of  law.  Its  substance  is  contained  in  the 
following  extract: 

"  If,  therefore,  the  acceptance  of  a  renomination  is  to  be  understood  as  imply- 
in"  a  willingness  on  my  part  to  be  longer  regarded  as  an  employment  agent, 
I  must  beg  leave  to  decline  the  honor,  grateful  as  I  would  be  to  receive  it  freed 
from  this°condition,  and  tendered  in  so  complimentary  a  manner.  I  assure 
you,  my  dear  sirs,  I  appreciate  most  profoundly  the  honor  done  me  by  your 
letter.  I  regard  the  frequent  re-election  of  a  citizen  to  Congress  by  the  people 
Hinon'"  whom  his  life  has  passed  as  intrinsically  the  highest  honor  that  can  be 
conferred  under  our  Government,  and  would  be  willing  to  make  great  personal 
sacrifices  to  be  its  recipient.  Permit  me,  therefore,  to  suggest  that  it  may  be 
possible  that  the  Republican  voters  of  the  Fourth  district,  having  had  this  great 
and  growing  evil  brought  to  their  attention,  will  condemn  and  endeavor  to  ex 
tirpate  it.  This  could  be  done  by  electing  a  nominating  convention  which 
would  approve  a  proper  civil  service  bill,  and  instruct  the  candidate  nominated 
to  make  Us  principles  his  rule  of  action  if  elected ;  or  would  adopt  a  resolution 
deprecating  the  interference  of  Representatives  in  the  selection  of  subordinate 
employes  in  the  public  offices  and  workshops.  If  this  can  be  done,  and  the 
Representative  can  be  permitted  to  devote  his  time  to  the  study  of  the  important 
questions  now  at  issue,  and  the  support  of  the  great  interests  at  stake,  I  will 
waive  all  personal  objections,  and  gratefully  comply  with  your  request  by  placing 
mvself  in  your  hands  as  a  candidate  for  renomination." 

397 


398 

the  successful  defence  of  that  system  of  protection  to  American  in 
dustry  which  has  made  your  district  one  of  the  most  prosperous  in 
the  country.  We  regard  the  next  Congress  as  among  the  most  im 
portant  ever  held,  when  great  questions  of  national  policy  will  be 
discussed  and  settled,  and  your  services  having  been  of  the  highest 
value  in  the  past,  they  will  be  more  so  in  the  immediate  future. 

"  You  were  never  so  well  qualified  to  grapple  with  the  difficulties 
before  us  as  now ;  you  never  occupied  a  prouder  position  than  now ; 
and  we  never  needed  you  more  than  at  present.  As  Mr.  Lincoln 
said  to  the  people  on  his  second  election,  so  we  say  to  you — we  have 
no  disposition  to  trade  horses  in  the  middle  of  the  stream;  and  when 
you  have  borne  your  burden  to  the  other  shore,  we  have  no  disposi 
tion  to  trade  even  there.  We  hope,  therefore,  you  will  accept  the 
nomination,  pledging  ourselves  to  use  our  best  efforts  to  give  you  a 
triumphant  return  to  your  seat  in  Congress." 

Judge  Kelley  said  in  reply : 

Mr..  Chairman  and  Gentlemen  of  the  Committee:  Permit 
me  to  thank  you  for  the  generous  expressions  you  have 
been  pleased  to  use  toward  me  in  performing  the  duty  con 
fided  to  you  by  the  convention.  You.  but  do  me  justice  in 
assuming  that  if  I  could  have  retired  from  public  life  at  the 
close  of  the  present  Congress,  without  ingratitude  or  indif 
ference  to  the  wishes  of  a  constituency  that,  through  more 
than  twenty-seven  years  has,  by  its  many  expressions  of 
confidence,  sustained  me  in  the  discharge  of  the  duties  of 
high  public  trusts,  I  would  gladly  have  done  so.  It  seemed 
to  me  to  be  a  fitting  time  to  retire.  But  I  should  indeed 
be  wanting  in  sensibility  were  I  not  profoundly  gratified  by 
the  manner  in  which  my  renomination  was  made,  and  by 
the  unanimous  adoption  by  the  convention  of  the  resolution 
approving  the  position  I  assumed  in  my  letter  of  March 
8th.  While,  therefore,  I  cannot  say  that  I  gladly  accept 
the  honor  you  tender  me,  I  would  be  wanting  in  candor  if  I 
did  not  assure  you  that  I  do  it  with  just  pride  and  a  renewed 
determination  to  prove  myself  worthy  of  the  confidence  of  so 
generous  a  constituency. 

The  decade  with  which  I  entered  Congress  has  been 
well  rounded.  The  momentous  issues  which  then  over 
shadowed  the  country  have  been  settled.  The  Union, 
cemented  by  the  blood  of  thousands  of  the  country's 
bravest  and  best  men,  remains  united  and  indivisible.  They 
who  were  then  slaves  now  enjoy  the  rights  and  exercise  the 
prerogatives  of  citizenship.  The  importance  of  this  change 
is  not  generally  appreciated.  Good  men  hail  its  accom 
plishment  as  a  grand  act  of  justice,  and  economical  science 
will  soon  establish  its  value  as  a  measure  of  policy.  Slavery 


JUDGE  KELLKY'S  ACCEPTANCE.  399 

excluded  free  paid  labor  from  the  fields  and  mines  of  the 
South,  to  which  freedom  welcomes  them,  and,  by  the  com 
plete  enfranchisement  of  the  slaves,  several  hundred  thou 
sand  votes  have  been  added  to  those  of  the  producing 
classes,  by  which  they  may  so  much  the  better  guard  their 
rights  in  legislative  halls.  The  workingmen  of  the  coun 
try  will  appreciate  the  importance  of  this  change  in  the 
( near  future. 

New  issues  have  arisen,  and  they  are  almost  as  grave  as 
were  those  we  have  thus  happily  settled.  The  great  ques 
tion  with  which  we  have  to  deal  is  not  a  national  but  an 
international  one.  The  parties  are  not  to  be  summoned  by 
bugle-  call,  or  marched  to  the  music  of  the  rolling  drum  and 
ear-piercing  fife.  Their  movements  will  be  determined  by 
the  average  rates  of  wages  for  labor,  and  the  measure  of 
education  and  chances  in  life  offered  to  the  children  of 
laborers.  The  historian  of  the  current  decade  will 
dwell  less-  upon  armies,  navies,  and  ministerial  changes, 
than  upon  the  apportionment  of  taxes  and  impost  duties, 
the  ebb  and  flow  of  immigration,  and  the  relative  develop 
ment  of  the  mineral  resources  of  the  countries  of  which 
he  shall  write.  The  contest  is  for  the  commercial  inde 
pendence  of  the  United  States  or  the  supremacy  of  England. 
The  imminent  question  for  the  statesman  is  how  to  cheapen  all 
that  contributes  to  the  support  of  human  life,  while  enhancing 
the  value  of  life  by  increasing  the  rewards  of  labor.  This 
will,  in  my  judgment,  be  best  accomplished  by  that  nation 
which,  by  the  well-paid  labor  of  its  people  produces  most 
of  its  supplies  from  raw  materials  found  within  its  limits ; 
or  which,  in  the  language  of  a  quaint  old  English  writer, 
"  sets  at  work  all  the  poor  of  the  country  with  the  growth 
of  its  own  lands."  Controlled  by  this  theory,  I  have  labored 
to  reduce  the  schedule  of  internal  taxes  with  which  our  in 
dustry,  enterprise  and  capital  are  burdened;  to  reduce  the 
duties  on  tea,  coffee  and  spices,  which  we  all  consume  but 
none  produce,  and  to  put  on  the  free  list  every  species  of 
raw  material  for  manufactures  which  we  do  not  produce. 
Much  of  this  has  been  done.  The  Senate  is  still  engaged 
upon  the  bill,  but  it  has  gone  far  enough  to  justify  me  in 
assuring  you  that  you  will,  by  the  legislation  of  this  ses 
sion,  be  relieved  of  at  least  $70,000,000  of  taxes.* 

*  The  bill,  as  it  was  adopted,  repeals  taxes  which  yielded  over  $80,000,000 
revenue  during  their  last  ye.m 


400 

The  recent  experience  of  England  is  giving  new  and 
startling  confirmation  to  the  theories  I  maintain.  Till 
within  a  quarter  of  a  century  she  was  the  most  protective 
of  nations,  and  enjoyed  the  proud  titles  of  "  Mistress  of  the 
Sea/'  and  "  Workshop  of  the  World."  Keeping  her  people 
employed  on  her  raw  material,  she  found  in  every  land  a 
market  for  her  coal,  limestone,  iron  ore,  wool,  and  the  labor 
that  had  wrought  them  into  articles  of  utility.  But  capti 
vated  by  the  glittering  sophisms  of  free  traders,  she  re 
pealed  her  protective  duties,  and  subjected  her  industries 
to  competition  with  those  of  France,  Belgium,  Prussia  and 
Austria,  whose  workmen  are  paid  little  more  than  half  the 
wages  received  even  by  the  underpaid  British  artizan. 
The  experiment  has  been  fatal  to  many  of  her  industries. 
Observe  this  pile  of  recent  books  and  pamphlets,  each  of 
which  bears  the  imprint  of  London  or  Manchester.  They 
are  eight  distinct  and  intelligent  protests  against  a  system 
which,  in  twenty-five  years,  has  reduced  England  from  her 
commanding  position  to  that  of  a  mere  carrier,  and  exporter 
of  skilled  workmen,  raw  wool,  and  coal,  and  manufactures 
but  little  advanced,  such  as  yarn  and  pig-iron.  There  are 
men  who  would  force  free  trade  upon  this  country,  and 
compel  our  mechanics  to  compete  with  those  whose  inade 
quate  wages  have  enabled  their  employers  to  undermine 
almost  every  branch  of  industry  in  England,  low  as  her 
wages  are  in  comparison  with  those  received  by  the  Amer 
ican  workman.  I  cannot  refrain  from  detaining  you  by 
citing  brief  passages  from  two  of  these  books.  Sir  Edward 
Sullivan,  in  his  "Protection  to  Native  Industry,"  published 
in  February  last,  says  : 

"France,  Belgium,  Switzerland,  Prussia  and  America  have  in 
creased  materially  in  wealth  and  prosperity  during  the  last  twenty 
years :  capital  has  flowed  steadily  and  with  increased  rapidity  into 
them;  new  manufactures  have  sprung1  up.  existing  industries  have 
increased,  trade  has  flourished,  speculation  and  enterprise  have 
taken  the  place  of  apathy  and  want  of  confidence.  All  this  has  taken 
place  under  a  system  of  rigid  protection.  During  the  same  period 
England,  under  a  half  and  half  system  of  free  trade,  has  also  in 
creased  her  commerce,  but  not  in  any  degree  in  the  same  proportion. 
Our  industries  are  everywhere  depressed  ;  many  of  them  have  left 
us,  or  are  fast  doing  so ;  trade  and  manufactures  that  we  once  mo 
nopolized,  are  springing  up  elsewhere  under  the  fostering  care  of 
protection;  the  confidence  of  our  manufacturers  is  shaken;  a  spirit 
of  discontent  and  uneasiness  depresses  the  operative.  Now,  is  this 
decline  of  manufacturing  prosperity  in  England,  as  compared  with 
the  increasing  prosperity  of  manufacturing  industries  throughout 
the  rest  of  Europe  and  America,  a  natural  consequence  of  the  spread 


JUDGE  KELLEY'S  ACCEPTANCE.       401 

of  capital  and  communication,  or  is  it  the  result  of  our  throwing 
open  our  ports  to  foreign  competition,  removing  all  protection  from 
our  native  industries,  and  bringing  into  competition  with  our  extra 
vagant  workmen  and  dear  labor  the  cheaper  productions  of  more 
economical  communities  ?  " 

In  this  book,  "  Home  Politics,  or  the  Growth  of  Trade, 
considered  in  its  Relations  to  Labor,  Pauperism,  and  Emi 
gration,"  which  appeared  in  March  last,  Mr.  Daniel  Grant 
in  confirmation  of  Sir  Edward's  allegations,  says  : 

"  At  the  outset  of  this  book  the  question  was  asked,  '  How  are 
the  people  to  find  work  and  food  ?'  And  this  question  is  forced 
upward  from  the  condition  in  which  England  stands  to-day.  We 
have  an  enormous  pauper  population,  and  a  population  still  greater 
just  above  pauperism.  We  have  an  export  trade  that  is  stationary  ; 
a  limitation  in  the  demand  for  labor  through  the  introduction  of 
machinery  ;  a  decrease  of  employment  through  the  force  of  foreign 
competition  ;  and,  to  intensify  all  these,  we  have  a  population  whose 
increase  is  at  least  six  hundred  per  day.  How  are  these  conditions 
to  be  dealt  with  ?  It  is  idle  and  weak  to  speak  of  the  great  wealth 
of  England  as  a  panacea  for  our  present  evils,  while  starvation  exists 
in  our  streets,  and  pauperism  and  destitution  threaten  to  overwhelm 
us.  The  weight  of  our  present  position  is  beginning  to  produce  its 
natural  effect,  and  men  who  are  usually  removed  from  the  impulses 
which  guide  public  life,  are  looking  around  them  and  saying  '  Where 
is  this  to  end  ?'  It  is  known  that  manufacturers  are  wasting  the 
fortunes  which  they  had  amassed  in  the  past,  in  the  endeavor  to  keep 
on  their  mills  at  half  time.  It  is  known  that  every  kind  and  every 
class  of  employment  are  not  only  filled  to  overflowing,  but  the  ap 
plicants  are  hopeless  in  their  endeavors  to  obtain  work.  In  the 
streets  of  London  men  are  to  be  found  by  thousands,  who  are  ready 
to  toil  and  cannot  find  the  work  to  do,  and  as  week  passes  week  fresh 
circumstances  continually  crop  up,  showing  that  underneath  all  this 
there  are  states  of  destitution  still  more  terrible ;  and  it  is  thus  that 
the  question  comes  fairly  home,  how  is  this  to  end  ?  " 

So  regardless  of  the  rights  of  our  laboring  people  are 
the  free-traders,  or  revenue  reformers,  as  they  call  them 
selves  in  this  country,  that,  in  full  view  of  the  effect  of 
free  trade  upon  the  laboring  classes  of  England,  they  would 
prostrate  flourishing  and  leading  industries  by  repealing 
the  duties  on  coal,  salt,  lumber,  pig-iron,  etc.  They  would 
do  this,  they  say,  to  give  the  workman  cheap  coal,  salt, 
and  other  commodities.  To  the  unemployed  workman 
whose  rent  is  due,  and  who  has  not  the  means  to  buy  a 
meal,  it  is  of  not  much  importance  whether  the  price  of  a 
tun  of  coal  or  salt  is  a  few  cents  more  or  less.  What  he 
wants  is  steady  work  and  fair  wages.  Without  these  his 
life  is  a  waste  and  his  family  a  burden,  though  he  loves 
them  ever  so  tenderly. 
26 


4:02  JUDGE  KELLEY'S  ACCEPTANCE. 

Let  me,  as  an  illustration,  consider  the  coal  question  for 
a  moment.  We  have  more  coal  than  all  other  civilized 
nations  combined.  Its  measures  stretch  across  the  conti 
nent  from  Rhode  Island  and  North  Carolina  to  Mount 
Diablo,  near  the  Bay  of  San  Francisco,  and  around  the  ex 
tended  shores  of  Puget  Sound.  It  also  abounds  in  the  British 
Provinces  on  both  coasts.  Its  production  and  transportation 
are  among  the  great  industries  of  our  country,  and  give  em 
ployment  to  many  thousands  of  men  and  support  to  their 
families  and  the  villages  in  which  they  dwell.  They  feed  on 
American  grain  and  meat,  and  are  clad  in  American  wool, 
spun  and  woven  by  American  labor.  Their  product  is 
carried  over  our  railroads  and  canals,  and  when  trans 
ported  by  sea,  gives  employment  to  American-built  vessels. 
There  is  a  duty  of  $1.25  per  ton  on  foreign  coal  imported 
into  this  country.  The  wages  paid  in  the  British  Provinces 
do  not  equal  ours  by  one  half,  nor  are  the  provinces  bur 
dened  by  our  war  debt  and  taxes;  and  we  derive  every 
year  about  $500,000  duty  in  gold  from  the  importation 
of  foreign  coal.  It  is  mined  by  men  who  feed  on  provin 
cial  grain,  and  wear  English  cloth,  hats,  and  shoes,  and  is 
brought  to  our  ports  by  vessels  built  with  the  cheap  labor 
of  the  Provinces.  What  benefit  could  possibly  accrue  to 
any  of  our  laboring  people  by  removing  the  duty  on  coal, 
stimulating  its  importation,  and  robbing  the  treasury  of 
half  a  million  dollars  annually  ?  I  freely  confess  that  I  am 
too  dull  to  see  it. 

But  I  detain  you  too  long.  As  I  have  said,  I  accept  with 
pride  the  nomination  you  so  handsomely  tender  me,  and 
pledge  myself  to  continued  endeavors  to  prove  myself 
worthy  of  the  confidence  you  and  those  you  represent  so 
generously  bestow. 


LETTER  ON  THE   CHINESE   QUESTION. 

JOHN  C.  LIBE,  ESQ.,  Recording  Secretary  of  Science  Council 
of  the  Order  of  United  American  Mechanics : 

Dear  Sir:  Your  favor  covering  the  circular  which  you 
inform  me  you  were  instructed  by  your  Council  to  trans 
mit  to  me,  with  the  request  that  I  would  "  favor  the  mem- 
bers  of  the  Council  with  my  views  upon  the  questions 
embodied  therein,"  is  at  hand. 

It  is  to  be  regretted  that  neither  your  note  nor  the 
circular  propounds  a  question.  The  latter,  however, 
embraces  the  preamble  and  resolutions  adopted  by  the 
Council  on  the  5th  of  July  last,  which  have  reference  to  a 
question  of  great  public  and  private  interest.  Having 
bestowed  much  consideration  upon  the  subject  to  which 
they  relate,  I  am  grateful  to  the  members  of  your  Council 
for  the  opportunity  thus  afforded  me  of  expressing  my 
views  thereon  to  so  numerous  and  intelligent  a  body  of  my 
fellow-citizens  as  the  members  of  the  Order  of  United 
American  Mechanics. 

The  preamble  and  resolutions  assert  that  "  a  movement 
has  been  inaugurated  in  neighboring  States  to  introduce 
Chinese  labor  on  an  extensive  scale  into  this  country,  and 
that  such  movement,  if  successful,  must  operate  to  the 
great  disadvantage  of  the  American  mechanic  and  labor 
ing  man,"  and  that  "the  time  has  arrived"  when  the 
members  of  your  order  should  "  use  every  exertion  and 
exercise  all  the  influence  in  their  power  to  prevent  the 
carrying  out  of  this  iniquitous  and  unjust  measure." 
These  propositions,  I  believe,  involve  the  questions  on 
which  you  request  an  expression  of  my  views. 

It  is  proper  that,  before  proceeding  to  the  consideration 
of  details,  I  should  say  that  I  believe  that  humanity  and 
the  true  interests  of  all  the  people  of  our  broad,  richly 
endowed  and  diversified,  but  thinly  settled  country,  re- 

403 


404:  LETTER    ON    THE    CHINESE   QUESTION. 

quire  us  to  welcome  such  of  the  people  of  all  other  coun 
tries  as  may,  in  pursuance  of  their  own  choice,  come  to 
dwell  among  us,  adopt  our  language  and  habits,  and  help 
us  to  develop  our  dormant  resources  and  maintain  our 
republican  institutions. 

But  this  proposition,  broad  as  it  is,  does  not  cover  those 
who  may  be  brought  hither  by  force  or  decoyed  by  false 
representation,  for  the  purpose  of  being  used,  without 
regard  to  their  rights  or  those  of  the  people  at  large.  For 
instance,  it  does  not  embrace  such  as  may  be  found  to 
have  been  brought  as  slaves  were  in  the  early  days  of  the 
Eepublic  from  Africa,  or  coolies  were  from  India  prior  to 
the  Act  of  February  19,  1862,  entitled  "An  Act  to  pro 
hibit  the  coolie  trade  by  American  citizens  in  American 
vessels,"  the  text  of  whir.h  may  be  found  on  page  145  of  2d 
Brightly's  Digest.  Though  but  a  new  member  at  the  date  of 
its  passage  by  the  House  of  Kepresentatives,  it  was  my  privi 
lege  to  co-operate  with  its  distinguished  author,  the  late 
Hon.  T.  Dawes  Eliot,  in  procuring  the  enactment  of  this 
humane  law.  Nor,  again,  does  my  proposition  apply  to  those 
who,  being  ignorant  of  our  language  and  of  the  ordinary  rate 
of  wages  paid  for  labor  and  the  cost  of  living  in  this 
country,  are  seduced  into  coming  here  under  a  contract 
for  years  of  labor  for  wages  which,  though  in  advance 
of  those  they  might  earn  at  home,  are  insufficient  for  the 
support  of  an  American  mechanic  and  the  maintenance 
of  his  children  while  obtaining  the  education  due  to  them 
in  our  common  schools.  Our  laws  should  secure  to  the 
victims  of  such  wrongs  the  amplest  means  of  redress,  and, 
at  least,  enable  them  to  return  to  their  native  land  at  the 
cost  of  the  wrong-doer. 

The  coolie  trade  was  suppressed  by  law  because  it  was 
a  system  of  violence  and  robbery ;  and  as  the  system  by 
which  Koopmanschap  and  others  are  attempting  to  induce 
hordes  of  Chinese  laborers  to  come  to  this  country,  under 
contract  to  work  for  wages  upon  which  they  cannot  live 
as  American  workingmen  should  live,  is  an  organized 
system  of  deception  and  fraud,  it  should  be  reprobated  by 
our  laws  as  sternly  as  the  other  has  been. 

You  will  observe  that  my  opposition  to  organized  efforts 
to  stimulate  Chinese  emigration  to  this  country  is  not 
based  on  hostility  to  the  Chinese,  but  that  it  arises  from 
their  ignorance  of  the  value  and  current  price  of  the 
services  they  contract  to  render,  of  the  habits  of  our  work- 


LETTER    ON    THE    CHINESE    QUESTION.  405 

ing  people,  and  of  the  general  cost  of  living  in  this  coun 
try  ;  arid  that,  coming  as  mere  sojourners,  to  return  at  the 
expiration  of  a  contract,  they  will  be  unencumbered  by 
the  expense  of  a  family,  or  civic  or  social  duties,  and  can 
afford  to  work  for  wages  that  will  not  enable  an  American 
citizen  to  maintain  a  home  and  educate  his  children  as 
republican  institutions  require. 

The  constant  aim  of  American  statesmanship  should  be  to 
secure  to  labor  such  a  share  of  its  production  as  may  enable 
each  laborer  to  make  provision  for  age  or  adversity.  Our 
country  is  so  broad,  and  embraces  such  an  infinite  variety 
of  soil,  climate  and  resources  that,  had  we  the  population 
and  skill  to  convert  every  description  of  our  raw  material 
and  avail  ourselves  of  the  diversities  of  our  soil  and 
climate,  we  might  supply  our  own  wants  and  maintain  a  rate 
of  wages  independent  of  those  of  other  countries.  But  so 
long  as  part  of  our  workshops  are  beyond  the  seas,  and 
we  depend  on  foreign  shops  for  a  large  part  of  our  manu 
factured  goods,  our  rates  of  wages  must  be  affected  by  those 
of  other  countries.'54' 

Chinese  wages  are,  I  believe,  lower  than  those  paid  in 
any  other  civilized  country.  American  wages  are  the 
highest,  and  the  two  rates  cannot  be  maintained  in  the 
same  community.  The  attempt  on  an  extended  scale  to 
commingle  them  would  be  as  disastrous  to  the  capital  as 
it  would  to  the  labor  of  the  country.  It  would  unsettle 
prices  and  cause  anarchy  in  trade.  A  little  reflection  will 
satisfy  any  experienced  business  man  on  this  point,  as  the 

*  How  thoroughly  British  capitalists  understand  the  effect  of  our  higher 
wages  upon  the  prices  of  commodities,  and  the  inadequacy  of  the  existing  tariff, 
especially  on  iron,  to  counter-balance  this  difference,  is  shown  by  the  following 
extract  from  Ryland's  Iron  Trade  Circular  (Birmingham,  England),  of  July 
1st,  1871: 

"  Notwithstanding  the  efforts  which  many  of  our  foreign  customers  are  mak 
ing  to  develop  their  own  iron  trade,  we  as  yet  do  not  seem  to  suffer.  The  most 
important  of  these  efforts  is  that  made  by  the  United  States  of  America.  We 
have  often  called  attention  to  the  remarkable  development  of  the  American  iron 
trade,  and  the  possibility  of  the  people  of  that  great  country  supplying  them 
selves  entirely  with  their  own  iron.  America  teems  with  the  raw  material,  and 
it  only  waits  the  hand  of  man  to  dig  the  ore,  to  smelt  and  puddle  the  iron,  and 
to  turn  it  into  all  the  varieties  of  the  finished  article.  So  far  America,  no 
doubt,  could  supply  the  world  with  the  whole  of  its  requirements,  and  could 
thus  close  the  English  trade  altogether.  But  as  long  as  the  labor  market  in  the 
United  States  remains  in  its  present  condition,  so  long  will  the  English  iron 
trade  maintain  its  hold  upon  that  country.  American  capitalists  are  not  at  all 
anxious  to  invest  in  the  iron  trade,  notwithstanding  its  strong  protective  tariff, 
and  while  labor  forms  ninety  per  cent,  of  every  ton  of  manufactured  iron,  and 
when  this  item  is  of  far  greater  value  in  the  States  than  it  is  in  our  own  country, 
it  is  quite  impossible  for  the  Americans  to  compete  with  us  even  with  such  a 
highly  protective  tariff  as  they  now  enjoy." 


406  LETTER    OX    THE    CHINESE   QUESTION. 

employer  who  paid  Chinese  wages  could  always  undersell 
those  in  the  same  business  who  sought  to  enable  their 
workmen  to  live  as  American  citizens  should  live,  by  pay 
ing  them  our  customary  wages  for  their  work. 

Sir  Edward  Sullivan,  in  his  recent  noble  appeal  for  the 
working  people  of  England,  entitled  "Protection  to  Native 
Industry,"  says: 

"  Wages  in  France,  Belgium,  Prussia,  Austria,  and  Switzerland 
are  from  thirty  to  fifty  per  cent,  lower  than  in  England ;  rent, 
clothing,  food,  beer,  taxes  and  general  charges  are  all  in  the  same 
proportion  ;  the  habits  of  the  people  are  economical  in  the  extreme  ; 
the  manufacturers  have  as  much  capital,  science  and  enterprise,  and 
the  operatives  as  much  skill  and  intelligence  and  technical  educa 
tion  arid  industry  as  we  have ;  they  get  their  raw  materials  very 
nearly  at  the  same  price  as  we  do.  The  question  is,  Can  our 
manufacturers,  with  higher  wages,  higher  rates  and  taxes,  higher 
general  charges,  and  our  operatives,  with  dearer  food,  dearer  clo 
thing,  dearer  house  rent  and  extravagant  habits,  produce  as  cheaply 
as  they  can?" 

Let  us  press  Sir  Edward's  point  a  little  further,  and 
apply  it  to  the  question  under  consideration.  A  report 
just  made  to  the  Treasury  Department,  by  Mr.  Edward 
Young,  Chief  of  the  Bureau  of  Statistics,  shows  that 
English  wages  are  as  far  below  ours  as  those  of  conti 
nental  States  are  below  those  of  England.  The  report 
appears  to  have  been  compiled  from  ample  data  and  with 
great  care,  and  makes  due  allowance  for  the  difference 
between  gold  and  our  currency  and  the  number  of  hours 
of  labor  required  for  a  week's  pay.  Without  detaining 
you  with  too  many  examples,  let  me  say  that  this  official 
report  shows  that  operatives  in  cotton  mills  in  the  New- 
England  and  Middle  States,  exclusive  of  overseers,  receive 
89.9  per  cent,  more  than  in  England,  and  that  in  the  case 
of  overseers  the  excess  is  74.3  per  cent. 

The  comparison  of  the  wages  paid  in  woolen  mills  is 
made  from  a  wider  field,  as  this  branch  of  industry  is  grow 
ing  rapidly  in  the  West.  It  embraces  the  mills  of  Vir 
ginia,  Indiana,  Wisconsin,  Iowa,  and  Kansas,  as  well  as 
those  of  the  Middle  and  New  England  States,  and  shows 
that  the  "average  advance  of  wages  paid  in  the  United  States 
in  1869  over  those  of  England  in  1867-68  (both  in  gold) 
was  24.36  per  cent."  The  rates  paid  in  American  paper 
mills,  including  those  to  boys  and  females,  as  ascertained 
from  the  mills  of  New  England,  Pennsylvania,  Ohio,  Illi 
nois  and  Wisconsin,  are  82  per  cent,  greater  than  in  Eng- 


LETTER   ON   THE   CHINESE    QUESTION.  4G7 

land.  And,  as  the  last  illustration  drawn  from  Mr.  Young's 
report  with  which  I  will  detain  you,  workmen  in  iron 
founderies  and  in  machine  shops  throughout  New  Eng 
land,  the  Middle  and  Western  States,  and  California 
receive  for  their  labor  86  per  cent,  more  than  is  paid  in 
England. 

Thus  it  appears  that  though  the  average  English  opera 
tive  receives  for  his  work  nearly  double  the  wages  paid 
his  continental  competitor,  he  gets  on  an  average  little 
more  than  half  as  much  as  he  would  for  the  same  work 
in  this  country.  The  welfare  of  our  country,  both  present 
and  ultimate,  requires  the  maintenance  of  our  scale  of 
wages,  and  its  advance  whenever  and  wherever  it  is  prac 
ticable.  But  how  is  this  to  be  accomplished  ?  How  can 
the  present  rates  be  defended  against  competition  with 
the  productions  of  the  underpaid  laborers  bf  England  and 
the  continent?  I  believe  that  a  protective  tariff  is  the 
only  possible  defence  of  our  rate  of  wages.  While  the 
underpaid  labor  is  performed  in  foreign  countries,  we  may 
defend  the  wages  of  the  American  mechanic  against 
competition  by  imposing  upon  its  productions,  when  im 
ported  into  this  country,  duties  equal  to  the  difference 
between  our  wages  and  the  lowest  rates  paid  in  competing 
countries. 

An  adequately  protective  tariff  is  the  American  work 
man's  sole  defence  against  ruinous  competition  by  the  un 
derpaid  workmen  of  foreign  countries.  But  if  French, 
Belgian,  German,  Austrian  or  English  mechanics  could  be 
brought  to  this  country  under  contract  to  work  for  three, 
five  or  seven  years  for  such  wages  as  they  receive  at  home, 
how  could  the  wages  of  the  American  workman  be  de 
fended  against  the  destructive  competition  ?  I  freely  ad 
mit  that  I  cannot  see  how  it  might  be  done.  Can  you  or 
any  member  of  your  council  show  me  ?  No  tariff  or  other 
law  can  protect  wages  against  home  competition,  and  I 
arn,  therefore,  opposed  to  permitting  the  importation  of 
men  who  have  contracted  to  work  in  our  midst  for  a  term 
of  years  at  such  wages  as  are  paid  in  China,  Austria,  Bel 
gium,  Germany  or  England.  The  prevalence  of  such  a 
system  would,  as  your  resolutions  assert,  "  greatly  reduce 
the  pay  for  skilled  labor,  and  thereby  lessen  the  family 
comforts  of  the  great  body  of  the  American  people." 

"  Buy  where  you  can  buy  cheapest,"  is  a  cardinal  maxim 
of  free  traders  and  revenue  reformers,  It  is  plausible,  but 


408  LETTEK   ON   THE    CHINESE    QUESTION. 

delusive.  If  applied  to  labor,  it  would  bring  Chinese 
workmen  to  us  by  the  million.  Yet  the  free  trade  agita 
tors,  both  in  and  out  of  Congress,  when  vindicating  this 
maxim,  assert  that  the  tariff  which  protects  his  wages  and 
his  chances  for  steady  work,  injures  the  workingman  by 

increasing   the   price   of  the   commodities   he  consumes. 

They  also  say  that  in  addition  to  cheapening  what  he  con 
sumes,  the  laborer's  market  would  be  increased  by  a  re 
duction  of  his  wages,  as  we  could  then  increase  our  com 
merce  and  ship  our  goods  to  foreign  countries  in  compe 
tition  with  European  manufacturers.  To  the  thoughtless 
and  inexperienced  this  is  all  very  plausible.  But  with 
your  experience  and  observation,  you  must  perceive  that 
to  reduce  the  price  of  our  goods  low  enough  to  accom 
plish  this  would  require  us  to  reduce  our  wages  below  the 
English  standard,  as  the  cheaper  labor  of  France,  Belgium, 
Switzerland,  Germany  and  Austria  is  restricting  her  ex 
ports  and  driving  the  productions  of  England  out  of  com 
mon  markets.  "  Buy  where  you  can  buy  the  cheapest," 
the  only  doctrine  by  which  the  employment  of  coolie 
labor  in  this  country  can  be  justified,  is  not  only  ruining 
the  working  people  of  England,  but  uprooting  many  of 
her  industries  which  were  believed  to  be  established  on 
impregnable  foundations,  and  thus  involving  the  laborer 
and  capitalist  in  a  common  ruin.  To  attain  cheapness  she 
repealed,  not  only  the  duties  imposed  on  food,  but  those 
which  protected  her  labor  against  the  competition  of  the 
lower  wages  of  the  continent.  She  entered  enthusiasti 
cally  upon  the  experiment  of  free  trade,  and  has  persisted 
in  it  for  about  a  quarter  of  a  century.  What  has  been 
the  result  of  this  race  for  cheap  labor  and  cheap  goods  ? 
Its  consequences  have  been  such  as  I  hope  our  country 
may  long  escape.  British  exports  are  not  only  stationary, 
but  declining,  and  poverty  and  pauperism  have  increased 
so  rapidly  that  the  people  of  Great  Britain  are  no  longer 
able  to  consume  their  own  productions  as  freely  as  they 
formerly  could,  and  the  demand  for  labor  falls  off  under 
the  double  influence  of  both  declining  export  trade  and 
home  consumption.* 

*  A  correspondent  of  the  N.  Y.  Tribune  writing  from  London,  March  llth, 
1871,  said: 

"  It  is  stated  that  M.  Thiers  declined  M.  Bismarck's  proposals  for  a  treaty  of 
commerce  between  France  and  Germany  on  the  ground  '  that  France  would  be 
compelled  to  restore  the  equilibrium  of  her  finances  by  a  high  tariff.'  In  making 
this  declaration,  the  distinguished  French  statesman  was  not  only  foreshadow- 


LETTER   OX   THE    CHINESE   QUESTION.  409 

In  his  recent  work,  "Home  Politics,  or  the  Growth  of 
Trade  Considered  in  its  Eelation  to  Labor,  Pauperism  and 
Emigration,"  Mr.  Daniel  Grant  demonstrates  the  correct 
ness  of  these  assertions  by  presenting  from  the  highest  offi 
cial  sources  the  number  of  England's  paupers,  and  the 
value  of  her  exports  for  the  three  latest  years  for  which 
the  figures  had  been  compiled.  They  are  as  follows : 

Paupers.  Exports. 

1866 920,344   £188,917,536 

1867 958.824    181,183,971 

1868 1,004,823    179,463,644 

ing  a  commercial  policy  in  harmony  with  his  antecedents  as  a  strong  Protectio 
nist,  but  one  absolutely  forced  upon  his  country  by  the  exigencies  of  her  position. 
To  obtain  the  revenue  which  France  now  finds  herself  compelled  to  raise,  she 
must  resort  to  the  most  stringent  measures;  and  there  is  no  form  of  impost  at 
once  so  productive  and  so  little  burdensome  to  the  mass  of  the  people  as  a  high 
tariff.  The  remark  is  trite;  but  no  man  feels  an  indirect  tax  as  he  does  a  direct 
one.  A  moderate,  or  even  a  considerable  enhancement  in  the  price  of  various 
commodities,  will  be  borne  with  far  more  patience  than  a  house,  property,  or 
income-tax,  which  must  be  paid,  at  stated  intervals,  in  hard  cash. 

"  It  is  a  curious  fact;  but,  when  France  has  reversed  her  commercial  policy, 
as  she  proposes  to  do,  England  will  be  the  only  great  manufacturing  country 
in  Europe — I  might  say  in  the  world — which  still  adheres  to  Free  Trade.  Even 
her  own  colonies — those  at  least,  in  which  the  people  are  allowed  self-govern 
ment,  such  as  Canada  and  Australia — have  deliberately  adopted  a  Protective 
Tariff.  As  to  England  herself,  she  has  now  tried  Free  Trade  for  several  years, 
and  with  what  result?  In  the  opinion  of  Cobden  and  the  Manchester  school  of 
political  economists,  it  was  to  be  a  panacea  for  every  ill.  The  loom  was  to  be 
ever  busy  :  the  workshop  ever  full !  Well !  such  an  utter  prostration  of  business 
as  has  existed  in  this  country  for  the  last  five  years  has  not  been  known  since 
1840.  It  is  true  this  state  of  things  cannot  be  exclusively  attributed  to  Free 
Trade.  But  if  Free  Trade  be  not  altogether  responsible  for  the  stagnation  of 
business,  it  has  certainly  not  in  any  way  modified,  but,  on  the  contrary,  in  a 
considerable  degree  intensified  the  distress  which  has  arisen  from  it.  Numerous 
branches  of  industry  have  been  seriously  affected,  while  some,  like  the  paper 
and  silk  manufactures,  have  been  all  but  completely  ruined  by  the  present  com 
mercial  policy  of  Great  Britain.  The  cheapness  of  labor  on  the  continent — not 
ably  in  Belgium — has  induced  English  capitalists  in  many  instances  to  enter 
into  contracts  with  firms  there  to  execute  orders  for  machinery  and  iron  work 
of  all  kinds,  both  of  which  have  hitherto  been  specialties  of  this  country.  In 
some  cases,  indeed,  iron  manufacturers  have  closed  their  factories  here  and  esta 
blished  others  in  Belgium,  simply  on  account  of  the  difference  in  the  price  of 
labor.  Not  only  the  locomotives,  but  a  very  considerable  portion  of  the  other 
rolling  stock  of  English  railways,  is  now  manufactured  in  that  country  or  in 
Denmark.  The  very  cars  on  the  Brixton  and  Kensington  Tramway,  by  which 
I  travel  daily,  have — with  the  exception  of  the  pattern  cars,  which  were  built 
in  New  York — been  made  in  Copenhagen.  And  it  is  a  fact  within  my  know 
ledge  that  the  contract  for  the  whole  of  the  wood-work  on  the  new  St.  Thomas's 
Hospital  was  executed  in  Norway;  even  the  window-sashes  and  frames  were 
fitted  and  put  together  there,  and  sent  over  finished  and  ready  to  be  inserted  in 
the  brick-work. 

"  The  middle,  or  trading,  class  is  not  altogether  dissatisfied  with  the  present 
etate  of  things.  So  long  as  they  can  buy  and  sell,  they  care  not  whose  labor 
has  prepared  the  article  for  the  market,  whether  the  article  be  domestic  or  for 
eign.  But  this  narrow,  short-sighted  policy  would,  if  persisted  in,  ultimately 
defeat  itself.  At  present,  there  is  an  enormous  amount  of  accumulated  wealth 
in  England,  and  the  evil  of  the  mass  of  non-workers  (for  pauperism  is  fright 
fully  on  the  increase),  who  have  to  be  supported  by  the  workers,  is  only 
partially  felt  by  the  community  at  large;  and  scarcely  at  all  by  the  law- 
making  class." 


410  LETTER   ON   THE    CHINESE   QUESTION". 

After  commenting  upon  the  fact  that  more  than  one 
thousand  paupers  are  each  week  added  to  the  already  ter 
rible  list,  Mr.  Grant  says : 

"  Even  this  large  increase  does  not  indicate  the  exact  extent  of 
poverty — it  points  to  the  still  wider  field  of  misery  that  exists 
among  the  classes  from  which  pauperism  is  fed.  Let  any  one  think 
what  is  the  state  of  destitution  through  which  a  man  passes  before 
he  is  willing  to  accept  relief  and  allow  himself  to  be  branded  as  a 
pauper.  Those  who  know  the  working  classes  best  know  the  pro 
found  abhorrence  they  entertain  of  the  workhouse.  Any  privation, 
any  sorrow,  any  destitution  rather  than  that ;  and  the  natural  in 
ference  is  that  the  pressure  of  want  is  not  only  severe,  but  has  been 
long  enough  sustained  to  have  swept  away  all  articles  of  clothing, 
as  well  as  all  household  goods,  before  the  sufferers  bend  to  their  fate." 

Thus  deplorable  has  been  the  effect  upon  the  laboring 
classes  of  England  of  the  determination  of  her  people  to 
accept  the  glittering  fallacies  of  the  free  trade  school  of 
economists,  and  buy  labor  and  its  products  where  they 
can  buy  them  cheapest.  Let  us  now  glance  for  a  moment 
at  the  effect  it  has  had  upon  capital  invested  in  special  in 
dustries.  It  was  soon  discovered  that  the  surface  ores  of 
the  copper  mines  of  Peru,  which  are  dug  by  peons — an 
other  name  for  slaves — were  cheaper  than  those  of  the 
deep  mines  of  Cornwall  and  Devonshire.  These  latter,  with 
all  their  machinery,  have  consequently  been  abandoned,  and 
such  of  the  miners  employed  in  them  as  had  saved  suffi 
cient  to  pay  their  passage  have  emigrated,  and  the  balance 
with  their  families  have  gone  to  the  workhouse.  The  ma 
nufacture  of  silk  had  made  prosperous  towns  of  Coventry 
and  Macclesfield,  but  Lyons  and  Paris  could  undersell 
them,  and  regardless  of  the  interests  of  their  toiling  coun 
trymen,  "  the  nobility  and  gentry "  of  England,  looking 
only  to  the  interests  of  the  consumer,  bought  where  they 
could  buy  cheapest,  and  the  silk-mills  of  Coventry  and 
Macclesfield,  with  their  expensive  machinery,  became 
worthless,  and  many  of  the  people  who  had  found  employ 
ment  in  them  went  to  the  workhouse  also.  I  could  refer 
to  scores  of  such  instances,  but  they  will  occur  to  your 
own  mind,  and  I  will  proceed  to  an  illustration  of  a  more 
general  character. 

Having  heard  that  the  home  consumption  of  British 
cottons  had,  within  a  few  years,  fallen  off  thirty-five  per 
cent.,  I  wrote  to  a  friend  who  has  resided  in  England  for 
some  years  to  learn  whether  the  statement  was  based  on 
a  mere  estimate  or  was  an  ascertained  fact.  I  could,  not 


LETTER   OX   THE   CHINESE    QUESTION.  411 

credit  the  assertion.  My  correspondent,  however,  sent 
me  copies  of  elaborate  tables  from  a  paper  prepared  and 
read  before  the  Manchester  Statistical  Society  by  Mr.  Eli 
jah  Helms,  which  was  printed  by  the  society.  By  com 
paring  the  home  consumption  of  British  cottons  during 
the  years  1866-7--8  with  that  during  1859-60-61,  Mr. 
Helms  shows  that  the  decrease  in  that  brief  period  had 
been  equal  to  211,933,000  pounds  of  raw  cotton,  or  thirty- 
five  per  cent.  I  have  also  before  me  an  able  pamphlet, 
by  a  Cotton  Manufacturer,  entitled  "  An  Inquiry  into  the 
Cause  of  the  long-continued  Depression  of  the  Cotton 
Trade,"  which  was  published  in  London  and  Manchester 
in  the  latter  part  of  last  year,  in  which  the  fact  is  again 
proven.  After  spreading  before  his  readers  a  large  array 
of  official  figures  the  author  says : 

"  The  case  stands  as  follows  :  Our  entire  exports  of  cotton  goods 
to  all  countries  have  increased  six  per  cent. ;  to  India  they  have  de 
creased  thirteen  per  cent.;  to  the  four  principal  continental  coun 
tries  they  have  increased  forty-five  per  cent.;  while  the  imports 
from  these  four  countries  have  fallen  off  two  and  a  half  per  cent. 
At  the  same  time  our  home  trade,  which  should  have  been  our  prin 
cipal  support,  has  fallen  off  thirty-five  per  cent." 

The  facts  I  have  thus  hastily  thrown  together  address 
themselves  not  only  to  the  artisan  and  laborer,  but  to  the 
farmer  and  him  whose  capital  is  employed  in  any  branch 
of  productive  industry.  What  each  wants  is  a  steady 
and  remunerative  market  for  that  which  he  has  to  sell, 
and  this  cannot  be  had  when  that  great  mass  of  consumers 
who  live  by  toil  are  compelled,  as  they  are  in  other  coun 
tries,  to  labor  for  the  least  amount  of  compensation  that 
will  serve  to  keep  body  and  soul  together,  without  an  as 
piration  or  a  hope  that  is  to  be  realized  this  side  of  the 
grave.  No  amount  of  foreign  trade  would  compensate 
the  farmers  and  manufacturers  of  the  United  States  for 
the  curtailment  of  their  home  market  that  would  inevi 
tably  follow  the  reduction  of  our  wages  even  to  the  Eng 
lish  standard.  To  whose  industry,  enterprise  or  capital 
can  the  more  than  one  million  English  paupers  give  pro 
fitable  employment?  Or,  who  can  sell  his  goods  to  that 
more  numerous  class  from  which  Mr.  Grant  says  "pauper 
ism  is  fed,"  and  who  are  selling  "  all  articles  of  clothing, 
as  well  as  household  goods  "  in  the  vain  hope  of  escaping 
the  workhouse  ?  Do  you  think  that  they  know  much 
about  the  color  and  quality  of  American  wheat,  or  even 


412  LETTER   ON  THE   CHINESE   QUESTION. 

of  the  flavor  of  the  beef  or  mutton  of  "Merrie  England," 
or  are  liberal  patrons  of  any  branch  of  industry  ? 

The  apostles  of  free  trade  regard  the  value  of  a  nation's 
exports  as  the  test  of  its  prosperity.  They  worship  for 
eign  trade  and  eornmerce.  From  this  test  I  dissent.  That 
nation  is  most  truly  prosperous  which  has  fewest  paupers,  the 
freest  domestic  commerce,  and  whose  people  are  able  to  enjoy  most 
7argely  the  comforts  and  luxuries  of  life  as  the  rewards  of 
t/ieir  labor,  even  though  it  have  no  foreign  trade.  To  pro 
mote  foreign  trade  free  traders  would  cheapen  goods, 
although  it  is  apparent  that  to  cheapen  them  sufficiently 
to  enable  us  to  take  her  customers  from  England,  and  so 
increase  our  trade,  we  must  reduce  our  wa^es  to  a 
point  below  those  she  pays,  as  we  must  underbid  her  in 
order  to  induce  them  to  buy  from  us.  Regarding  protec 
tive  duties  as  an  obstruction  to  commerce,  they  resist  their 
enactment  and  strive  to  repeal  or  reduce  those  imposed  by 
existing  laws,  although  to  effect  either  their  repeal  or  re 
duction  would  inevitably  compel  a  general  reduction  of 
the  rate  of  wages ;  for  were  we  to  repeal  the  duties  which 
now  defend  and  protect  the  wages  of  the  American  me 
chanic,  and  secure  to  him  our  generous  home  market  for 
his  labor,  our  stores  and  warehouses  would  soon  be  gorged 
with  the  cheaper  productions  of  the  ill-paid  labor  of 
Europe,  and  the  proprietors  of  our  mines,  mills,  factories 
and  workshops  would  be  forced,  by  the  want  of  a  market 
for  their  highter  priced  goods,  to  discharge  their  hands  and 
close  their  establishments.  Nothing  can  be  clearer  than 
this.  And  in  three  years  from  our  abandonment  of  the 
protective  system  the  workingmen  of  the  country  would 
suffer  again  the  agonies  endured  in  1837,  and  1857,  and 
British  statesmen  would  be  able,  as  they  then  were,  to  com 
ment  upon  the  depression  of  American  labor,  and  show 
that  poverty  and  pauperism  were  increasing  as  rapidly  in 
the  industrial  centres  of  the  United  States  as  they  now 
are  in  those  of  England.  Indeed,  such  action  on  our  part 
would  be  an  unspeakable  blessing  to  England.  It  would 
revive  her  trade  and  some  of  the  leading  branches  of 
her  languishing  industry.  She  has  natural  advantages, 
which  counterbalance  the  lower  wages  of  the  continent  in 
the  production  of  many  articles,  among  which  I  may  name 
salt,  coal,  pig  and  bar  iron,  rails,  both  of  iron  and  Besse 
mer  steel,  cast  steel,  and  iron  steamships,  with  all  of  which 
she  would  supply  our  market  in  the  absence  of  protective 


LETTER   ON    THE    CHINESE    QUESTION.  413 

duties  and  the  venerable  law  which  prohibits  the  graut- 
ing  of  an  American  register  to  a  foreign-built  vessel. 

But  you  may  ask  what  has  all  this  to  do  with  the  ques 
tion  upon  which  Science  Council  directed  you  to  request  an 
expression  of  my  views?  A  moment's  reflection  will 
show  you  its  pertinence.  The  danger  you  would  ward  off 
is  the  competition  of  underpaid  labor;  and  if  it  be  true 
that  low  wages,  even  in  distant  countries,  against  which  a 
protective  tariff  can  defend  you,  may  in  the  event  of  the  with 
drawal  of  such  defence  by  Congress,  overwhelm  and 
destroy  you,  how  much  more  destructive  would  be  the  effect 
of  the  importation  of  hordes  of  men  bound  by  contract 
to  work  in  your  midst  at  Chinese,  French,  Belgian,  Ger 
man,  Austrian  or  English  wages  ?  If  once  established  in 
your  midst,  no  law  could  protect  you  against  their  compe 
tition  ;  and  I  assure  you  and  the  members  of  your  council 
that  I  have  too  just  a  sense  of  the  rights  and  dignity  of 
labor,  and  have  toiled  too  long  and  hard  to  secure  com 
pensation  even  to  the  slave  for  his  work  in  the  shop,  or 
cotton,  sugar,  or  rice  field,  to  permit  myself  to  approve  of 
such  an  arrangement,  let  it  promise  what  incidental  advan 
tages  it  may. 

In  conclusion,  permit  me  to  say  again  that  I  am  not  op 
posed  to  the  voluntary  immigration  of  the  people  of  China 
into  this  country.  If  left  to  their  own  impulses,  and  to  pay 
the  cost  of  the  voyage,  those  only  will  corne  who  are  of 
the  better  class  and  have  by  energy  and  thrill  been  able  to 
accumulate  a  sum  sufficient  to  bring  them  here  and  start 
them  in  their  new  home ;  but  under  a  system  by  whicli 
each  man's  passage  is  paid  and  his  subsistence  while  here 
assured,  we  shall  probably  get  the  most  abject  and  possibly 
only  the  most  degraded  denizens  of  the  populous  cities  of 
China.  Those  who  come  voluntarily  and  at  their  own  cost 
will  take  an  interest  in  their  adopted  country  and  its  in 
stitutions,  acquire  our  language,  and  adopt  our  habits. 
Such  an  immigration  would,  like  that  from  other  countries, 
stimulate  our  general  industries  while  increasing  our  pro 
ductive  power ;  it  would,  by  peopling  our  vast  territories 
that  now  lie  waste  and  unproductive,  enhance  the  demand 
for  labor  by  increasing  our  home  market  and  the  carrying 
trade  in  which  so  much  of  our  capital  and  so  many  of  our 
people  are  engaged.  But  it  may  do  more  than  this.  It  is 
in  the  power  of  the  Chinese  to  establish  new  and  profita 
ble  industries  among  us.  Let  me  mention  two,  the  intro- 


414  LETTER   ON   THE    CHINESE    QUESTION. 

duction  of  which  would  injure  none  of  us  but  benefit  all. 
I  allude  to  tea  and  silk.  For  tea  we  send  abroad  about 
$10,000,000  annually,  and  for  silk,  about  $20,000,000.  We 
produce  no  tea,  and  are  but  experimenting  in  the  produc 
tion  of  raw  silk,  of  which  we  import  $2,500,000  per 
annum  for  the  use  of  our  infant  silk  manufactories  at 
Paterson,  Hartford,  and  Philadelphia,  in  some  of  which  I 
may  remark,  machinery  is  now  used  that  was  once  profita 
bly  employed  in  Coventry  and  Macclesfield.  We  have 
immense  natural  fields  for  the  cultivation  of  both  tea  and 
silk  besides  those  of  California  and  Arkansas,  and  the 
Chinese,  the  earliest  and  most  successful  cultivators  of  both, 
would  benefit  us  immensely  by  transferring  their  experi 
ence  and  patient  industry  to  our  country.  I  would  not, 
therefore,  exclude  them  by  legal  enactment.  But  to 
protect  the  right  even  of  foreigners  to  fair  wages  for 
work  done  in  this  country,  and  to  avert  the  dangers 
threatened  to  American  mechanics  by  the  importation  of 
hordes  of  coolies,  I  would  provide  by  statute  that  any  con 
tract  made  in  a  foreign  country  by  which  a  person  propos 
ing  to  emigrate  to  any  State  or  territory  within  the  United 
States  shall  bind  himself  to  labor  for  any  term  of  years  or 
months,  at  a  rate  of  wages  specified  therein,  shall  be  null 
and  void. 

Believing  that  a  law  embodying  these  provisions  will  be 
enacted  by  Congress  at  its  next  session,  I  remain, 
Yours,  very  truly, 

WM.  D.  KELLEY. 

PHILADELPHIA,  August  22,  1870. 


CENTENNIAL   CELEBRATION   AND   INTER- 
NATIONAL   EXPOSITION. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
JANUARY  IOTH,  1871. 

The  House  having  under  consideration  the  bill  (H.  E.  No.  1478) 
to  provide  for  celebrating  the  one  hundredth  anniversary  of  Ameri 
can  independence  by  holding  an  international  exhibition  of  arts, 
manufactures,  and  products  of  the  soil  and  mine,  in  the  city  of 
Philadelphia  and  State  of  Pennsylvania,  in  the  year  1876— 

Mr.  Kelley  said : 

Mr.  Speaker :  This  bill  has  been  treated  by  its  oppo 
nents  as  though  its  object  were  a  purely  local  one.  It  is 
not  so.  The  city  of  Philadelphia,  the  State  of  Pennsyl 
vania,  and  the  Franklin  Institute  of  Pennsylvania  origi 
nated  the  movement  for  the  centennial  celebration  of  the 
Declaration  of  Independence,  and  are  willing  to  take, 
under  the  auspices  of  the  Government  of  the  United 
States,  the  responsibility  of  its  preparation  and  manage 
ment.  And  to  that  end  the  bill  does  little  more  than  ordain 
that  such  a  celebration  shall  be  had  at  Philadelphia,  and 
provide  for  the  appointment  by  the  President  of  one  com 
missioner  from  each  State  and  Territory  upon  the  nomina 
tion  of  the  Governor  thereof. 

The  proposed  exhibition  is  to  celebrate  events  that  are 
not  merely  of  national  but  of  world- wide  interest.  It  is 
to  commemorate  not  a  day,  but  an  epoch  in  universal  his 
tory  ;  not  an  event,  but  a  series  of  events  that  occurred  in 
rapid  succession,  gave  birth  to  republican  liberty,  and 
organized  a  nation  that  stands  to-day,  when  measured 
by  the  number  of  its  population,  the  extent  and  geographi 
cal  position  of  its  territory,  the  intelligence  and  enterprise 
of  its  people,  and  the  variety  and  volume  of  its  resources 
and  productions  first  and  proudest,  though  but  an  infant 
among  the  nations  of  the  world.  London  and  Paris  were 
venerable  cities  when  the  American  continent  was  discov 
ered,  and  this  bill  proposes  to  invite  the  people  of  London, 

415 


416  CENTENNIAL  CELEBRATION. 

Paris,  and  the  world  at  large  to  behold  the  results  of  one 
century  of  republican  liberty  in  a  country,  whose  people 
are  the  offspring  of  those  of  every  land  and  clime,  and  to 
challenge  them  to  present  the  best  results  of  their  genius, 
experience,  and  labor  in  comparison  with  those  of  this 
young  and  heterogeneous  but  free  people. 

The  proposed  celebration,  sir,  will  prove  to  be  of  national 
importance  by  its  relation  to  the  business  of  the  country.  I 
hold  in  my  hand  one  of  the  most  instructive  politico-econo 
mic  works  of  the  last  year.  "  Home  Politics ;  or,  the 
Growth  of  Trade  considered  in  its  Relation  to  Labor,  Pau 
perism,  and  Emigration,"  by  Daniel  Grant,  published  in 
London.  I  request  the  attention  of  the  House  to  a  pas 
sage  from  this  work  with  respect  to  the  influence  of  the 
first  and  second  expositions  on  the  trade  of  England.  It 
is  as  follows : 

"  In  an  early  part  of  this  chapter  it  was  pointed  out  that  the  per 
sonal  knowledge  of  buyer  and  seller  forms  an  important  link  in  the 
growth  of  trade,  and  in  one  sense  the  first  exhibition  aided  this. 
Men  who  for  years  had  known  each  other  by  name  came  to  know 
each  other  as  a  matter  of  fact,  and  thus  built  up  relations  that  pro 
duced  a  mutual  good.  The  mere  prestige  of  the  '  world's  bazaar  ' 
brought  men  from  every  quarter  of  the  habitable  world,  and  they 
carried  away  with  them  to  their  distant  homes  the  memory  of  Eng 
lish  productions,  that  bore  fruit  then  and  has  borne  fruit  since.  At 
the  time,  among  the  whole  of  our  manufacturers,  it  was  recognized 
as  an  unchallengable  fact  that  the  exhibition  had  stimulated  trade, 
that  orders  were  plentiful,  arid  that  its  success  was  great. 

"  The  statistics  do  more  than  bear  this  point  out ;  the  bound  in 
our  exports  is  both  clear  and  decisive.  It  will  be  necessary  to 
notice  here  that  the  direct  results  of  the  exhibition  would  not  be 
manifest  until  the  year  after  it  closed,  and  would  most  probably  ex 
tend  twelve  months  beyond.  The  exhibition  did  not  close  until  the 
end  of  the  year  ;  the  orders  given  during  the  time  would  be  delivered 
partly  in  the  year  1851,  and  partly  in  1852,  and  the  return  orders 
some  months  later,  so  that  the  effects  would  appear  in  the  following 
years.  The  statistics  here  given  show  very  markedly  the  growth  of 
our  exports  at  the  particular  epochs. 

"  9ur  exports  in  1851,  were  £74,448,722,  in  1852,  £78,076.854. 
and  in  1853,  £98,933,780  ;  showing  an  advance  in  the  two  years  of 
£24,485,050. 

"  The  same  results  are  apparent  in  the  two  years  after  our  second 
exhibition. 

"Our  exports  in  1862,  were  £123,992,264 ;  in  1863.  £146,602,342  ; 
and  in  1864,  £160,444,053  ;  showing  an  advance  in  the  two  years  of 
£36,456,789." 

No  one  can  consider  these  figures  and  the  reflections  of 
Mr.  Grant  without  conceding  that  such  an  exhibition,  held 


CENTENNIAL    CELEBRATION.  417 

in  one  of  our  great  cities,  would  largely  expand  the  trade 
of  the  entire  country,  and  would  attract  an  enormous  flow 
of  immigration,  especially  of  skilled  mechanics,  artists,  and 
men  of  enterprise  whose  capital  though  too  limited  to  pro 
duce  a  competence  in  Europe,  might  enable  them  to  amass 
fortunes  in  this  country  of  cheap  land  and  undeveloped 
resources. 

The  question,  therefore,  is  one  of  national  importance, 
and  should  not  be  treated  as  a  local  one,  because  it  is  pro 
posed  that  the  commemorative  exhibition  shall  be  held  in 
the  city  in  which  the  events  which  it  is  to  commemorate 
occurred.  I  regret  exceedingly  that  the  gentleman  from 
New  Jersey  [Mr.  Cleveland]  is  not  in  his  seat.  He  pro 
posed  to  hold  such  a  celebration  in  New  York,  and,  in  sup 
port  of  his  strange  proposition,  invited  the  attention  of  the 
House  to  the  fact  that  for  forty  years  New  York  has  had 
an  association  for  the  promotion  of  the  mechanic  arts, 
known  as  the  American  Institute.  Sir,  forty-five  years 
ago,  I  was  a  copy-reader  in  a  printing  office,  and  I  remem 
ber  well  that  among  the  copy  which  most  puzzled  me  was 
that  of  Dr.  Jones,  who  was  then  at  the  head  of  the  Patent 
Office  and  editor  of  the  journal  of  the  Franklin  Institute, 
an  institution  which  had  then  been  publishing  its  proceed 
ings  for  several  years.  This  was  five  years  before  the  or 
ganization  of  the  American  Institute.  The  Franklin  In 
stitute  of  Pennsylvania  hailed  the  organization  of  and  has 
rejoiced  in  the  prosperity  of  the  American  Institute,  and 
recognizes  it  as  its  most  successful  offspring  and  as  one  of 
its  most  influential  co-workers  in  developing  our  manufac 
turing  and  mining  resources  and  promoting  the  general 
interests  of  our  country. 

The  gentleman  from  New  York  [Mr.  Brooks],  in  oppos 
ing  the  bill,  spoke  of  the  inconsequential  character  of  the 
preamble  and  resolutions.  Kegarding  the  proposed  expo 
sition  as  a  commemoration  only  of  the  Declaration  of  In 
dependence,  he  said  that  document  had  nothing  to  do  with 
the  progress  of  manufactures  and  the  arts.  In  this  opin 
ion  he  dissents  from  that  of  Thomas  Jefferson,  as  he  will 
discover  by  turning  to  volume  one  of  Jefferson's  Works, 
page  129.  He  will  there  find  that  Mr.  Jefferson  assigns 
the  attempt  by  England  to  suppress  manufactures  and  pre 
vent  their  establishment  as  a  potent  cause  of  the  revolt  of 
the  Colonies.  He  says : 

"That  to  heighten  still  the  idea  of  parliamentary  justice  and  to 
27 


418  CENTENNIAL   CELEBRATION. 

show  with  what  moderation  they  are  like  to  exercise  power  where 
themselves  are  to  feel  no  part  of  its  weight,  we  take  leave  to  men 
tion  to  his  Majesty  certain  other  acts  of  the  British  Parliament  by 
which  we  were  prohibited  from  manufacturing  for  our  own  use  the 
articles  we  raise  on  our  own  lands  with  .our  own  labor.  By  an  act 
passed  in  the  fifth  year  of  the  reign  of  his  late  Majesty,  King  George 
II.,  an  American  subject  is  forbidden  to  make  a  hat  for  himself  of 
the  fur  which  he  has  taken  perhaps  on  his  own  soil ;  an  instance  of 
despotism  to  which  no  parallel  can  be  produced  in  the  most  arbi 
trary  ages  of  British  history.  By  one  other  act,  passed  in  the 
twenty-third  year  of  the  same  reign,  the  iron  which  we  make  we  are 
forbidden  to  manufacture ;  and  heavy  as  that  article  is,  and  neces 
sary  in  every  branch  of  husbandry,  besides  commission  and  insur 
ance,  we  are  to  pay  freight  for  it  to  Great  Britain,  and  freight  for  it 
back  again,  for  the  purpose  of  supporting,  not  men,  but  machines, 
in  the  island  of  Great  Britain.''* 

That  gentlemen  may  perceive  how  well  founded  these 
complaints  of  the  colonists  were,  let  me  quote  a  portion 
of  the  two  laws  to  which  Mr.  Jefferson  refers.  I  might 
cite  many  kindred  acts,  but  parts  of  these  will  suffice. 
Let  me  read  the  fourth  section  of  chapter  twenty-two  of 
the  fifth  year  (1732)  of  George  II.  It  is  as  follows : 

"  Whereas  the  art  arid  mystery  of  making  hats  in  Great  Britain 
hath  arrived  to  great  perfection,  and  considerable  quantities  of  hats 
manufactured  in  this  kingdom  have  heretofore  been  exported  to  his 
Majesty's  plantations  or  Colonies  in  America,  who  have  been  wholly 
supplied  with  hats  from  Great  Britain;  and  whereas  great  quanti 
ties  of  hats  have  of  late  years  been  made,  and  the  said  manufacture 
is  daily  increasing  in  the  British  plantations  in  America,  and  is  from 
thence  exported  to  foreign  markets,  which  were  heretofore  supplied 
from  Great  Britain,  and  the  hat-makers  in  the  said  plantations  take 
many  apprentices  for  small  terms,  to  the  discouragement  of  the 
said  trade,  and  debasing  the  said  mannfacture  ;  wherefore,  for  pre 
venting  the  said  ill  practices  for  the  future,  and  for  promoting  and 
encouraging  the  trade  of  making  hats  in  Great  Britain, 

"  Be  it  enacted  by  the  king's  moat  excellent  majesty,  by  and  withthe 
advice  and  consent  of  the  Lords  spiritual  and  temporal  and  Com 
mons  in  this  present  Parliament  assembled,  and  by  the  authority  of 
the  same,  That  from  and  after  the  29th  day  of  September,  A.  D. 
1732,  no  hats  or  felts  whatsoever,  dyed  or  undyed,  finished  or  unfin 
ished,  shall  be  shipped,  laden,  or  put  on  board  any  ship,  or  vessel  in 
any  place  or  ports  within  any  of  the  British  plantations,  upon  any 
pretence  whatsoever,  by  any  person  or  persons  whatsoever;  and 
also,  that  no  hats  or  felts,  either  dyed  or  undyed,  finished  or  unfin 
ished,  shall  be  laden  upon  any  horse,  cart,  or  other  carriage,  to  the 
intent  or  purpose  to  be  exported,  transported,  shipped  off,  carried, 
or  conveyed  out  of  any  of  the  said  British  plantations  to  any  other 
of  the  British  plantations,  or  to  any  other  place  whatsoever,  by  any 
person  or  persons  whatsoever." 


*  See  Jefferson's  letter  of  January  9,  1816— ante,  page  51. 


CENTENNIAL   CELEBRATION.  419 

The  ninth  and  tenth  sections  of  the  other  act  referred  to, 
chapter  twenty-eight  of  the  twenty-third  year  (1750)  of 
George  II.,  are  as  follows : 

"  IX.  That  from  and  after  the  24th  day  of  June,  1750,  no  mill  or 
other  engine  for  slitting  or  rolling  of  iron,  or  any  plating  forge  to  work 
with  a  tilt-hammer,  or  any  furnace  for  making  steel,  shall  be  erected, 
or  after  such  erection,  continued  in  any  of  his  Majesty's  colonies  in 
America ;  and  if  any  person  or  persons  shall  erect,  or,  cause  to  be 
erected,  or  after  such  erection  continue,  or  cause  to  be  continued,  in 
any  of  the  said  Colonies,  any  such  mill,  engine,  forge,  or  furnace, 
every  person  or  persons  so  offending  shall,  for  every  such  mill,  en 
gine,  forge,  or  furnace,  forfeit  the  sum  of  £200  of  lawful  money  of 
Great  Britain. 

"  X.  And  it  is  hereby  further  enacted  by  the  authority  aforesaid, 
That  every  such  mill,  engine,  forge,  or  furnace  so  erected  or  con 
tinued,  contrary  to  the  directions  of  this  act,  shall  be  deemed  a  com 
mon  nuisance  ;  and  that  every  Governor,  Lieutenant-Governor,  or 
Commander-in-chief  of  his  Majesty's  colonies  in  America,  where 
any  such  mill,  engine,  forge,  or  furnace  shall  be  erected  or  continued, 
shall,  upon  information  to  him  made  and  given,  upon  the  oath  of 
any  two  or  more  credible  witnesses,  that  any  such  mill,  engine, 
forge,  or  furnace  hath  been  so  erected  or  continued,  (which  oath  such 
Governor,  Lieutenant-Governor,  or  Commander-in-chief  is  hereby 
authorized  and  required  to  administer,)  order  and  cause  every  such 
mill,  engine,  forge  or  furnace  to  be  abated  within  the  space  of  thirty 
days  next  after  such  information  given  and  made  as  aforesaid  ;  and 
if  any  Governor,  Lieutenant-Governor,  or  Commander-in-chief  shall 
neglect  or  refuse  to  do  so  within  the  time  herein  before  limited  for 
that  purpose,  every  such  Governor,  Lieutenant-Governor,  or  Com 
mander-in-chief  so  offending  shall,  for  every  such  offense,  forfeit  the 
sum  of  £500  of  lawful  money  of  Great  Britain,  and  shall  from  thence 
forth  be  disabled  to  hold  or  enjoy  any  office  of  trust  or  profit  under 
his  Majesty,  his  heirs  or  successors." 

Thus,  sir,  the  history  of  the  Colonies,  the  laws  of  Eng 
land,  and  the  express  assertion  of  the  author  of  the  Declar 
ation  of  Independence  assure  us  that  no  character  of 
celebration  of  the  events  we  propose  to  commemorate 
could  be  more  appropriate  than  one  which  would  exhibit 
to  the  world  the  results  of  the  mining,  manufacturing,  and 
artistic  skill  of  a  people  who,  one  hundred  years  ago,  were 
not  permitted  to  manufacture  a  felt  hat  or  a  plow  or  nail 
from  the  productions  of  their  own  soil.  Certainly  no  cele 
bration  could  be  more  apposite  or  more  fitting. 

Then  comes  the  question,  "  Where  should  it  be  held  ?  " 
Why,  sir,  it  should,  in  the  judgment  of  the  country,  be 
held  where  the  Continental  Congress  assembled,  deliber 
ated,  and  acted,  and  where  Carpenters'  Hall  still  stands,  as 
it  did  when  the  first  prayer  for  Congress  was  uttered.  It 
should  be  in  the  vicinity  of  Independence  Hall,  where 


420  CENTENNIAL  CELEBRATION. 

the  Declaration  of  Independence  was  signed  and  pro 
claimed  to  the  people,  and  where  may  be  seen  the  old  bell, 
whose  peals  summoned  them,  now  shattered,  but  still 
perfect  in  form,  and  bearing  the  prophetic  inscription,  cast 
upon  it  about  a  century  before  the  great  event  it  an 
nounced.  "  Proclaim  liberty  throughout  all  the  land  unto 
all  the  inhabitants  thereof."  It  should  be  near  to  the  hall 
in  which  the  Constitution  was  framed  and  adopted,  and  to 
that  in  which  the  first  Congress  of  the  United  States 
assembled ;  and  these  are  all  in  Philadelphia.  Were  the 
celebration  of  the  centennial  anniversary  of  this  great 
epoch,  embracing  this  series  of  grand  historical  events,  to 
be  held  in  any  other  city  it  would  be  out  of  place,  and  the 
people  who  might  attend  it  would  wander  from  its  pre 
cincts  to  Philadelphia,  in  search  of  the  scenes  and  halls 
amid  which  and  in  which  the  men  whose  deeds  they 
would  commemorate  had  consummated  their  great  designs. 
Can  Philadelphia  accommodate  it  ?  Sir,  many  of  the 
members  of  this  House,  including  members  of  the  Com 
mittee  on  Foreign  Affairs  and  the  Committee  on  Manufac 
tures,  have  visited  our  city  with  reference  to  this  question. 
They  spent  delightful  hours  in  our  park,  unequaled  in  the 
world,  either  in  extent  or  beauty,  through  which  flow  the 
beautiful  Schuylkill  and  the  romantic  Wissahickon,  and 
which  contains  more  than  twenty-six  hundred  acres  of 
undulating  land,  embracing  both  banks  of  these  beautiful 
streams.  When  Miss  Frances  Anne  Kernble  first  visited 
us  she  was  fresh  from  Italy  and  Switzerland,  among  whose 
mountains  and  lakes  she  had  passed  years ;  yet  familiar  as 
she  was  with  the  wondrous  beauty  of  their  scenery  she 
found  its  equal  within  the  limits  of  Philadelphia's  park. 
Listen  to  what  she  said  on  the  subject : 

To  the  Wissahickon. 

My  feet  shall  tread  no  more  thy  mossy  side, 

When  once  they  turn  away,  thou  pleasant  water, 

Nor  ever  more,  reflected  in  thy  tide, 

Will  shine  the  eyes  of  the  white  island's  daughter. 

But  often  in  my  dreams,  when  I  am  gone 

Beyond  the  sea  that  parts  thy  home  and  mine, 
Upon  thy  banks  the  evening  sun  will  shine, 

And  I  shall  hear  thy  low,  still  flowing  on. 

And  when  the  burden  of  existence  lies 
Upon  my  soul  darkly  and  heavily, 

I'll  clasp  my  hands  over  my  weary  eyes, 
Thou  pleasant  water,  and  thy  clear  waves  see. 


CENTENNIAL   CELEBRATION.  421 

Bright  be  thy  course,  forever  and  forever — 

Child  of  pure  mountain  springs  and  mountain  snow 
And  as  thou  wanderest  on  to  meet  the  river. 

Oh,  still  in  light  and  music  may'st  thou  flow ! 
I  never  shall  come  back  to  thee  again, 
When  once  my  sail  is  shadowed  on  the  main ; 
Nor  ever  shall  I  hear  thy  laughing  voice, 
As  on  their  rippling  way  thy  waves  rejoice; 
Nor  ever  see  the  dark  green  cedar  throw 
Its  gloomy  shade  o'er  the  clear  depths  below. 
Never,  from  stony  rifts  of  granite  gray, 
Sparkling  like  diamond  rocks  in  the  sun's  ray, 
Shall  I  look  down  on  thee,  thou  pleasant  stream, 
Beneath  whose  crystal  folds  the  gold  sands  gleam. 
Wherefore,  farewell !  but  whensoe'er  again 

The  wintry  spell  melts  from  the  earth  and  air ; 
And  the  young  spring  comes  dancing  through  thy  glen, 

With  fragrant,  flowery  breath,  and  sunny  hair ; 
When  through  the  snow  the  scarlet  berries  gleam, 
Like  jewels  strewn  upon  thy  banks,  fair  stream, 
My  spirit  shall  througli  many  a  summer's  day 
Return  among  thy  peaceful  woods  to  stray. 

Here,  sir,  amidst  these  scenes  of  beauty,  and  in  the 
midst  of  a  collection  of  American  trees  and  foliage  such  as 
is  nowhere  else  to  be  found  within  the  limits  of  a  city,  we 
ask  that  this  exposition  shall  be  held.  Sir,  we  make  this 
request  not  with  reference  to  the  beauty  of  the  site  alone, 
but  to  its  utility  and  fitness  also. 

Through  the  Philadelphia  park  passes  the  junction 
railway,  b}^  which  goods  shipped  for  exhibition  from  any 
part  of  the  continent  of  America,  which  is  connected  with 
a  through  line  of  railway,  may  be  delivered  at  the  ground 
proposed  to  be  set  apart  for  the  exhibition  without  trans 
fer  or  breaking  bulk. 

Again,  the  great  thing  that  the  people  of  Europe  would 
learn  by  visiting  us,  would  be  the  effect  of  free  institutions 
upon  the  masses  of  the  people,  and  that  which  they 
would  most  admire,  and  which  they  could  see  nowhere 
else  in  such  numbers  and  perfection,  would  be  the  homes 
of  our  working  people.  I  repeat,  sir,  that  by  nothing  that 
they  would  see  in  this  country  would  the  workingmen  or 
the  capitalists  of  Europe  be  more  instructed  than  in  look 
ing  at  the  homes  of  the  workmen  of  Philadelphia.  No 
tenement  houses  there.  Each  laborer  who  has  a  family 
dwells  under  a  separate  roof,  which  is  most  frequently 
his  own  ;  in  a  house  lighted  by  gas,  supplied  with  an  abun 
dance  of  pure  hydrant  water.  In  every  house  there  is  a 


422  CENTENNIAL    CELEBRATION. 

bath-room,  into  which  there  ran  streams,  warm  and  cold, 
of  the  pure  water  provided  by  the  public.  This  is  a 
startling  contrast  to  the  homes  of  the  workingmen  of  Eng 
land,*  France,  Belgium,  Prussia,  or  any  other  land.  To 
thus  bring  the  people  of  Europe  to  a  knowledge  of  how 
laborers  live  in  our  free  Republic  would  give  an  upward 
impulse  to  the  temporal  condition  of  humanity  everywhere. 
Sir,  the  gentleman  from  New  York  [Mr.  Brooks]  said 
he  was  not  hostile  to  Philadelphia,  inasmuch  as  he  re- 

farded  her  as  one  of  the  principal  suburbs  of  New  York, 
do  not  wonder  at  that,  for  in  truth  the  two  cities  are 
each  the  other's  principal  suburb.  They  are  so  near  each 
other,  their  population  is  so  nearly  equal,  and  each  is  so 
thoroughly  the  complement  of  the  other,  that  each  may, 
without  affectation,  so  regard  the  other.  They  are  but 
little  more  than  two  hours  apart,  and  the  road  that  connects 
them  is  the  one  to  which  I  have  alluded  that  runs  through 
the  park. 

London  imports  through  Liverpool,  Paris  through  Havre, 
and  our  merchants  receive  most  of  their  importations 
through  New  York  for  precisely  the  same  reasons  that 
control  those  of  London  and  Paris.  They  do  it  for  greater 
convenience,  and  our  imports  thus  swell  the  volume  of 
New  York's  apparent  greatness.  In  her  we  find  one  of 
our  principal  customers,  and  she  is  largely  our  factor  and 
distributing  agent. 

We  have  no  rivalry  with  New  York.  Her  field  of 
operations  is  with  foreign  countries;  ours  is  at  home. 
We  convert  the  raw  material  of  our  own  and  other  lands 
into  utilities  and  matters  of  taste  and  vertu.  We  are  a 
producing  people;  they  are  a  trading  people.  Our  roots 
are  fixed  in  the  soil  of  our  country ;  they  move  with  the 


*  Toil  as  they  may,  our  working-classes  (and  I  do  not  limit  the  term  to  our 
manual-labor  class),  even  under  favorable  circumstances,  have  a  hard  task  in 
providing  for  their  old  age — for  that  night  of  life  when  no  man  can  work.  They 
have  brought  up  families,  and  the  family  should  do  its  duty  so  far  as  it  can  to 
the  parent — the  bread-winner,  who  supported  its  members  in  helpless  infancy, 
and  even,  it  may  be,  at  no  small  cost  to  himself,  started  them  in  life.  Yet  in 
many  oases,  if  not  in  all,  the  most  a  working  man  can  do,  is  by  contributing  to 
sick-societies  and  others,  to  lay  by  so  much  as  will  keep  himself  during  transient 
illness,  or  when  temporarily  out  of  employment.  We  regret  to  say  it,  but  it 
really  seems  to  us  impossible  for  the  working-classes  as  a  body  to  lay  by  enough 
to  keep  them  during  the  impotence  of  old  age. —  The  State,  the  Poor,  and  the 
Country t— Patterson. 

House  rent  in  our  larger  towns  has  risen,  till  anything  like  a  wholesome 
dwelling  is  beyond  the  reach  of  the  average  workmen. — Social  Politics, — Kirk. 


CENTENNIAL   CELEBRATION.  423 

changes  of  commerce.  And  New  York,  but  for  the  pos 
sibility  of  increasing  her  manufactures,  which  local  taxa 
tion  and  excessive  prices  for  real  estate  and  high  rents  must 
retard,  may  one  day  follow  the  great  cities  that  have,  from 
time  to  time,  been  reared  on  the  commercial  routes  of 
the  past,  and  are  now  known  only  to  history.  A  city  de 
pending  exclusively  upon  trade  may  be  regarded  as  pos 
sibly  transitory,  so  long  as  the  routes  of  commerce  are 
liable  to  change. 

Sir,  in  comparing  the  two  cities  (I  have  no  idea  of 
contrasting  them,  for,  as  an  American,  I  rejoice  in  the 
growth  and  progress  of  each)  let  me  tell  you  something 
of  the  people  of  Philadelphia  and  their  products.  The 
census  just  taken  is  incomplete.  General  Walker,  the 
Superintendent  of  the  Census  Bureau,  assured  me  to-day 
that  the  statement  which  I  hold  in  my  hand  is  from  twenty 
to  twenty-five  per  cent,  too  low  in  its  aggregate  of  her 
manufacturing  products.  The  total  of  imports  into  the 
country  during  the  last  fiscal  year,  not  into  New  York, 
but  into  the  country;  not  on  the  Atlantic  coast,  but  on  the 
Atlantic  and  Pacific  coasts,  amounted  to  a  little  more  than 
four  hundred  and  sixty-two  million  dollars.  That  was 
the  value  of  our  entire  import  of  manufactured  articles, 
and  of  raw  material,  whether  for  food  or  manufacture.  The 
entire  imports  were,  I  say,  but  $462,377,587,  while  the  pro 
ducts  of  industry,  as  far  as  ascertained,  in  Philadelphia  alone 
were  $251,663,921.  Add  to  this,  as  I  am  authorized  by 
the  Superintendent  of  the  Census  to  add,  twenty  per  cent., 
and  it  will  be  found  that  her  productions  alone  were  far 
greater  than  the  manufactured  imports  of  the  country,  and 
equal  to  more  than  two-thirds  of  the  entire  imports  of  raw 
materials  and  manufactured  articles. 

Philadelphia  has,  far  as  ascertained  (and  the  numbers 
will  be  greatly  increased  by  the  revision  now  making), 
6090  establishments,  employing  a  capital  of  $205,564,238; 
employing  in  horse-power,  of  steam,  31,582,  and  of  water, 
2226;  employing  88,631  males  above  sixteen  years  of 
age,  23,545  females  above  that  age,  7356  children  and 
youth ;  paying  wages  annually  to  the  amount  of  $52,236,- 
026;  using  materials  to  the  value  of  $132,618,873;  and 
yielding  manufactured  products,  as  I  have  already  said,  to 
the  value  of  $251,663,921.  And  the  Superintendent  of 
the  Census,  from  information  already  in  his  posssession, 


424  CENTENNIAL    CELEBRATION. 

justifies  me  in  swelling  this  amount  to  $300,000,000.* 
But  for  the  further  information  of  the  House  I  will  at  this 
point  incorporate  in  my  remarks  the  table  in  detail  imper- 
tect  as  it  is.  (See  next  page.) 

Here,  then,  among  these  appliances  for  the  conversion 
of  raw  materials  into  the  comforts  and  luxuries  of  life ; 
here  among  these  busy  mechanicians ;  here,  in  the  home 
of  Franklin,  whose  old  printing  press  will  furnish  a  strik 
ing  contrast  when  put  beside  the  "Hoe's  last  fast"  or  the 
latest  patent  press  that  will  be  operating  in  those  days; 
here,  where  Jefferson  and  his  compatriots  consulted  upon 
the  problem  of  independence,  where  Washington  presided 
over  the  Convention  which  framed  the  Constitution,  where, 
under  that  Constitution,  he  dwelt  as  Chief  Magistrate  of 
the  country,  surrounded  by  the  great  men  of  that  day 
from  all  the  then  States ;  here,  where,  in  a  park  embrac 
ing  more  than  twenty-six  hundred  acres  of  land,  the  di 
mensions  of  the  exhibition  may  spread  to  a  hundred  or 
five  hundred  acres,  from  every  point  of  which  the  eye 
shall  be  filled  with  natural  beauty ;  here,  at  a  spot  acces 
sible  from  every  part  of  the  country,  blessed  with  a  rail 
road,  should  this  commemorative  exhibition  be  held. 

I  am  asked  what  it  will  cost.  The  amendment  submit 
ted  by  my  colleague  [Mr.  MorrellJ  proposes  to  limit  the 
amount  that  may  be  expended  by  the  Government  to 
$50,000  a  year  until  1876,  when  the  sum  may  be  increas 
ed  to  $250,000,  making  a  total  expenditure  of  $500,000. 
Sir,  I  have  no  idea  that  under  the  provisions  of  this  bill 
the  first  year's  expenses  of  the  commissioners  will  be 


*  The  following  is  an  approximate  summary  of  the  Industrial  Establishments 
of  Philadelphia,  their  machinery  and  production  for  the  census  of  1870  :  as 
corrected  (at  Philadelphia)  up  to  September  1st,  1871. 

No.  of  Establishments 8,119 

Capital  employed,  (not  including  value  of  land) $172,079,754 

No.  of  Factories  driven  by  steam 1,668 

Horse  power  of  these 45,101 

No.  of  Looms 15,692 

'     Spindles 189,757 

'     Machines  driven  by  steam 51,152 

'     Men  employed 86,939 

'     Females  (over  16  years) 34,728 

'     Boys  and  girls  (under  16  years) 9,202 

Total  persons  employed 130,869 

Aggregate  wages  paid $  58,997,010 

"          cost  of  raw  material 174,139,094 

"          value  of  manufactures 325,371,943 


CENTENNIAL   CELEBRATION. 


425 


GENERAL  ABSTRACT— SCHEDULE  FOUR—  RECAPITULATION— CITY 
OF  PHILADELPHIA,  PENNSYLVANIA. 


TITLES, 
(not  revised.*) 

estab 
lish 
ments. 

CAPITAL. 

Horse-powe^    Hands  employed. 

WAGES. 

MATERIALS. 

PRODUCTS. 

| 

CO 

3 

£ 

Malr» 
abore 
16. 

Females 
above 
16- 

Chil- 

and 
youth. 

Boots  and  shoes... 
Boot  and  shoe  nt- 

674 

17 
80 
53 
391 

10 

139 
23 
345 
118 
4 
205 
81 
138 
59 
310 

87 
148 
21 

24 
71 
21 
9 
50 
84 
90 

1 

97 
123 

107 
8 

13 

27 
28 

41 

£ 
33 
11 
130 
54 
44 

$2,274,636 

57,150 
1,814,500 
3,221,450 
768,075 

44,700 
200,685 
383,750 
986,040 
1,707,497 
59,100 
2,363,650 
26<',7;">0 
1,767,955 
409,487 
4,369,114 

42 

395 
445 
119 

"22 

96 
34 

181 
20 
500 
20 
402 
125 

::: 

4,620 

88 
2,332 
485 
1,091 

45 

505 
275 
1,213 
1,502 
45 
3,464 
271 
1,682 
526 
4,038 

1,380 

114 

4 

27 

16 

160 
3 

872 
53 

18 

4,464 
15 
1,445 
114 

"28 
1,664 
74 

239 
141 
9 
2 

105 

] 
31 

"*53 
3,183 

581 
14,803 

8,742 
23^45 

215 

6 

437 
7 
86 

1 
8 
12 
113 
15 
14 
379 
28 
53 
5 
73 

18 
10 
469 

34 
115 
1 

560 
557 
42 
31 

21 
190 
3 
9 
3 

"'« 
15 

17 

32 
1 

51 
724 

375 

4,741 
2,615 
7^50 

$2,478,082 

67,743 
1,151,647 
327,440 
298,981 

25,040 
217,664 
134,438 
524,168 
865,880 
32,452 
1,700,436 
99,438 
1,006,190 
275,278 
2,032,639 

753,863 
438,664 
898,662 

384,008 
1,414,227 
107,060 
552,610 
834,870 
389,980 
1,675,711 

750,000 

211,426 
1,820,285 
352,200 
286,322 
173,250 

181,622 
126,045 
221,369 

395,592 
195,440 
176,129 
373,308 
237,671 
1,793,163 
536,084 

$3,279,548 

61,411 

356,984 
1,706,106 
1,714,462 

64,016 
154,890 
170,548 
791,851 
660,264 
28,070 
4,798,253 
282,258 
1,097,080 
338,982 
6,546,731 

1,647,475 
917,141 
2,122,354 

-2,562,190 
2,213,004 
3,827,085 
482,792 
1,921,546 
744,643 
1,618,060 

2,528,000 

421,188 

2,559,485 
1,524,0.9 
348,824 
111,200 

1,316,374 

2,681,502 
1,001,994 

709,886 
182,380 
827,031 
18,206,062 
429.288 
6,728,51  fi 
3,226,851 

$7,724,805 

150,657 
2,703,148 
4,182,050 
3,004,189 

116,340 
587,776 
532,067 
2,014,058 
2,103,884 
83,922 
7,397,636 
601,452 
3,004,873 
896,284 
10,707,008 

4,180,643 
1,691,401 
3,476,454 

3,877,180 
5,295,072 
4,835.593 
1,560,643 
3,265,807 
1,515,476 
4,605,312 

5,000,000 

876,434 
6,301,397 
2,444,000 
893,161 
431,800 

3,216,410 
5,591,832 
1,833,316 

1,451,  «04 

671,000 
1,625,981 
19,581,374 
930,755 
11,204,802 
4,952,904 

Rrick-makers  

Bakeries  

Bread,  cuke,   ice- 

Blacksmiths  
Brass  founderies.. 
Cigars  
Carriages  
"     (children's) 

Confectionery  
Cabinet-makers... 
Coopers 

Clothing  
Carpen:ers     and 
builders  
Carpenters  
Cotton-mills  
Drugs  and  chemi 
cals  
Founderies  (iron). 
Grist-mills  
Glass-works  
Hosiery  

1,110,500 
383,050 
2,682,000 

2,579,500 
4,240,420 
597,50n 
l,22i;,016 
1,0:27,700 
811,800 
5,107,245 

5,000,000 

293,400 

4,974,200 
2,560,000 
228,625 
493,000 

1,466,750 
1,405,774 
907,800 

829,735 

700,000 
787,600 
3,494,000 
598,750 
7,149,OOC 
2,255,000 

1 

1,015 

501 
675 
1,017 
170 
469 
39 
1,541 

800 

35 
762 
435 

121 

467 
43 
700 

820 
59 
499 

i  'i96 

2,558 
!  1,237 

690 

isi 

767 

"  8 

j    ... 

1  ;;; 

i:;; 

IS 

1,975 
250 
27226 

1,337 
658 
1,034 

589 
2,480 
157 
727 
797 
630 
3,194 

1,300 

478 
2,119 
691 
547 

278 

326 
158 
387 

537 
312 
329 
942 
545 
1,903 
779 
45,317 
43,314 
88,631 

Machinists  
Machinery     and 
tubing  
Plumbers  &  gas- 
fitters 

Printers  

Paper-mills  

Pianos  

Paints,  lead   and 
linseed  oil  
Patent  medicines 
Planing-mills  
Sashes,  doors,  and 
blinds  
Sewing-machines 
Soap  and  candles 
Sugar  refiners  .... 
Tinsmiths  
Woolen-mills  
Yarns  

All  others  
Total  

3,9V  y 

2,111 

6,090 

74,203,90418,161 
131,360,33413,421 

26,617,077 
25,618,949 

82,910,7  04,  147,120,7(4 
49,708,169!  1  04,543/21  7 
$132,618,873  $261,663,921 

$205,564,238  31,58'. 

$52,236,026 

An  abstract  from  the  manufacturing  returns  of  Philadelphia,  as  received  from  the  assistant  mar 
ehals— correspondence  not  completed— respectfully  furnished  for  the  information  of  Hon.  William  1) 
Kelley,  U.  S.  House  of  Representatives.  FRANCIS  A.  WALKER,  Superintendent  Census. 


*  I  have  not  adopted  a  classification.— F.  A.  W. 


426  CENTENNIAL   CELEBRATION. 

anything  like  that  amount.  But,  assuming  that  they  will,  we 
appropriated  the  same  sum  to  send  a  few  articles  to  the 
Paris  Exposition.*  Here  we  invite  the  people  of  every 
State  and  Territory  to  present  in  brilliant  array  among 
and  in  comparison  with  the  best  productions  of  other 
countries  their  best  productions  of  field,  mine,  workshop, 
or  studio.  And  the  appropriation  is  asked  for  the 
benefit  of  the  people  of  the  more  remote  and  poorer 
States,  to  whose  borders  many  an  immigrant  would  be  at 
tracted  by  a  generous  exhibition  of  the  many  and  various 
elements  of  wealth,  in  which  every  part  of  the  country 
abounds  in  such  marvelous  profusion. 

*  These  provisions   were   stricken  from  the  bill.     The  IT.  S.  Government    is, 
not  to  be  responsible  for  any  part  of  the  cost  of  the  exhibition. 


DOMINICA. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  ^REPRESENTATIVES 
JANUARY  27,  1871. 

The  house  having  under  consideration  the  joint  resolution  (S.  R. 
No.  262)  authorizing  the  appointment  of  commissioners  in  relation 
to  the  republic  of  Dominica — 

Mr.  Kelley  said: 

Mr.  Speaker:  The  desire  of  President  Grant  to  ac 
quire  direct  trade  with  and  a  footing  upon  San  Domingo, 
the  richest  of  the  West  India  islands,  is  inspired  by  a  keen 
perception  of  the  commercial  requirements  of  the  country, 
and  sanctioned  by  the  action  of  Washington  and  his  most 
illustrious  successors  in  the  presidental  office.  On  the  14th 
of  October,  1789,  less  than  six  months  after  his  inaugura 
tion,  Washington  addressed  an  autograph  letter  to  Mr. 
Gouverneur  Morris,  who  was  then  representing  us  in 
Europe,  in  which  he  said : 

"  Let  it  be  strongly  impressed  on  your  mind  that  the  privilege  of 
carrying  our  productions  in  our  own  vessels  to  their  islands,  and 
bringing  in  return  the  productions  of  those  islands  to  our  ports  and 
markets,  is  regarded  here  as  of  the  greatest  importance." 

Time  and  observation  increased  Washington's  apprecia 
tion  of  the  importance  of  this  trade  to  our  country.  He 
adhered  to  the  point  with  the  tenacity  which  characterizes 
the  efforts  of  President  Grant.  And  in  his  letter  of  in 
structions  to  Mr.  Jay,  our  minister  to  England,  nearly 
five  years  after  his  letter  to  Mr.  Morris,  in  May,  1794, 
he  said : 

"  If  to  the  actual  footing  of  our  commerce  and  navigation  in  the 
British  European  dominions  could  be  added  the  privilege  of  carrying 
directly  from  the  United  States  to  the  British  West  Indies,  in  our 
bottoms  generally,  or  of  certain  specified  burdens,  the  articles  which 
by  the  act  of  Parliament,  (28  Geo.  III.,  chap.  6,)  may  be  carried 
thither  in  British  bottoms,  and  of  bringing  others  thence  directly  to 

427 


428  DOMINICA. 

the  United  States  in  American  bottoms,  this  would  afford  an  accept 
able  basis  of  treaty  for  a  term  not  exceeding  fifteen  years." 

It  was  not,  however,  permitted  the  Father  of  his  Country 
to  secure  to  its  people  this  important  commercial  privilege, 
even  as  to  a  few  articles  and  in  vessels  of  limited  tonnage. 
Presidents  Adams,  Jefferson,  Madison,  Monroe,  and  John 
Quincy  Adams  made  the  same  object  a  leading  feature  of 
their  respective  administrations,  but  with  like  want  of  suc 
cess.  It  is  possible  that  the  younger  Adams  might  have  suc 
ceeded  but  for  the  fact  that  what  Washington  and  the  others 
had  sued  for  as  a  privilege  he  demanded  as  a  right.  By 
thus  placing  the  negotiation  upon  a  new  footing  he  failed  as 
the  others  had  done.  At  the  end  of  more  than  forty  years, 
however,  President  Jackson  succeeded  in  accomplishing 
this  most  desirable  object ;  and  to  his  administration  be 
longs  the  glory  of  its  consummation  and  the  immense  and 
immediate  expansion  of  our  commerce  that  ensued. 

Let  me  pause  for  a  moment  to  ask  why  the  fathers  of 
the  country  were  so  anxious  for  the  privilege  of  direct 
trade  with  the  West  Indies,  and  why  the  European  powers 
who  had  dominion  over  the  archipelago  so  persistentlv  re 
fused  to  accord  us  the  privilege  of  direct  communication 
with  our  neighbors,  of  whose  productions  we  have  ever  been 
such  large  consumers  ?  It  w"as  because  those  Govern 
ments  saw,  as  clearly  as  the  statesmen  of  our  country,  the 
importance  to  the  American  Republic  of  unrestricted  trade 
with  the  islands  of  the  Caribbean  sea,  whose  waters  wash 
our  shores. 

The  fathers  of  the  country  having  been  forced  into 
armed  rebellion  by  the  restrictions  imposed  by  Great 
Britain  upon  the  development  of  our  natural  resources  and 
manufacturing  and  commercial  power,  had  learned  that 
international  trade  conducted  exclusively  along  parallels 
of  latitude,  and  between  nations  producing  the  same  com 
modities,  could  not  be  generally  profitable  to  the  people 
of  both  countries,  and  must,  if  left  to  the  government  of 
the  laws  of  trade,  uninfluenced  by  a  tariff  of  compensatory 
duties,  be  ultimately  beneficial  only  to  those  countries 
whose  mines  had  been  opened,  industries  established,  tools 
and  machinery  paid  for,  by  past  profits,  and  who,  with 
skilled  and  disciplined  laborers  and  artisans,  were  also  in 
the  enjoyment  of  capital ;  and  must  prevent  or  restrict  the 
progress  in  the  arts  of  the  younger  competitor,  whose 


DOMIXICA.  429 

mines  were  to  be  opened,  factories  built,  machinery  ac 
quired,  industries  organized;  and  all  this  with  inadequate 
capital,  as  was  the  case  with  the  United  States. 

The  only  commerce  in  which  our  fathers  could  hope  to 
engage  with  advantage  was  with  non-manufacturing  and 
tropical  countries,  from  which  they  could  obtain  those 
articles  of  food  and  raw  material  for  manufacture  which  we 
do  not  produce,  and  whose  people  would  require  the  pro 
ductions  of  the  fields  and  workshops  of  our  colder  country 
To  prevent  the  young  Eepublic  from  carrying  to  and  from 
the  West  Indies  was  to  deprive  it  of  the  power  to  establish 
a  commercial  marine,  such  as  might  provide  and  man  a 
navy  in  time  of  war ;  and  to  add  to  the  price  of  tropical 
food  and  raw  material  its  people  might  require  for  con 
sumption  as  food  or  in  the  arts  the  cost  of  transportation, 
first  to  the  mother  country  and  thence  to  our  ports,  with 
profits  and  commissions  to  foreign  merchants  and  bankers. 
Hence  it  was  that  every  American  patriot  saw  that  direct  and 
even  unrestricted  trade  with  the  West  India  islands  would 
be  a  blessing  to  the  country,  and  every  European  statesman 
perceived  with  equal  clearness  that  our  maritime  and 
manufacturing  power  must  be  greatly  restricted,  and  we 
continue  to  be  producers  of  raw  materials  only,  so  long  as 
this  boon  could  be  withheld  from  us. 

Nor,  sir,  are  these  considerations  less  potent  to-day  than 
they  were  in  the  infancy  of  the  country.  The  treachery 
of  our  great  commercial  rival  has  swept  that  part  of  our 
commercial  marine  which  was  engaged  in  foreign  com 
merce  from  the  sea,  and  her  ships  are  largely  engaged  in 
bringing  the  productions  of  the  West  Indies  to  our  ports. 
Meanwhile  the  export  duties  laid  by  the  Governments  of 
the  islands,  including  the  Dominican  republic,  upon  ma 
hogany,  fustic,  logwood,  satin-wood,  lance-wood,  coffee, 
cocoa,  and  other  articles,  and  the  import  duties  which,  al 
though  they  do  not  compete  with  our  industries,  but  enter 
into  our  food  or  are  consumed  in  our  manufactures,  we 
absurdly  impose  upon  them,  are  taxes  upon  our  industry, 
handicapping  it  in  its  race  with  the  manufacturing  nations 
of  Europe. 

The  fathers  also  saw  the  incompatibility  of  maintaining, 
under  the  simple  Government  they  had  founded,  a  large 
standing  army  and  navy.  They  perceived  the  necessity 
of  preparing  for  war  in  time  of  peace,  but  they  felt  them 
selves  unable  to  bear  the  cost,  and  clearly  perceived  the 


430  DOMINICA. 

. « 

danger  to  republican  institutions  of  maintaining  great 
armies  or  a  great  navy  during  peace,  and  wisely  determined 
to  rely  upon  the  militia  for  the  exigencies  of  war.  As  to  land 
forces,  there  was  no  difficulty  in  executing  this  purpose  ; 
but  if  they  were  to  rely  upon  the  people  for  ships,  officers, 
and  sailors  in  war,  they  must  establish  and  maintain  a 
commerce  sufficiently  extended  to  make  ships  profitable 
and  create  a  constantly  augmenting  commercial  marine. 
Looking  at  our  extended  coast,  they  saw  that  if  we  were 
to  be  prepared  to  defend  it  and  to  maintain  our  flag  upon 
the  sea  we  must  have  ship-yards  at  many  points  along  the 
coast,  skill  and  capital  to  use  them  to  advantage,  and  the 
trade  in  which  to  profitably  engage  the  vessels  they  would 
construct.  They  believed  in  the  constitutional  right  to 
promote  these  great  national  objects  by  special  legislation, 
and  did  it  promptly  and  successfully.  Denied  the  privi 
lege  of  trading  with  the  West  Indies  they  secured  to 
American  built  ships,  owned  by  American  citizens  domi 
ciled  within  the  country,  the  entire  carrying-trade  between 
the  ports  of  the  United  States  by  the  provisions  of  the  act 
of  September  1,  1789,  for  regulating  the  coasting  trade, 
and  for  other  purposes. 

This  beneficent  act,  preceding  which  but  ten  laws  had 
been  signed  by  Washington,  and  which  British  ship 
builders  are  imploring  us  to  repeal,  limits  the  carrying  be 
tween  any  ports  of  the  United  States  to  vessels  bearing  an 
American  register,  and  denies  such  register  to  any  vessel 
not  built  within  the  States,  and  belonging  wholly  to  a 
citizen  or  citizens  thereof,  and,  by  section  five,  denies  any 
part  of  our  domestic  carrying-trade  even  to  a  "ship  or 
vessel  owned  in  whole  or  in  part  by  any  citizen  of  the 
United  States  usually  residing  in  any  foreign  country, 
unless  he  be  an  agent  for  or  a  partner  in  some  house  or 
copartnership  consisting  of  citizens  of  the  United  States 
actually  carrying  on  trade  in  the  said  States." 

We  have  to  thank  the  prescience  which  ordained  these 
wise  provisions  in  the  earliest  days  of  our  national  ex 
istence  for  the  magnificent  results  achieved  upon  the  ocean 
and  lakes  by  our  Navy  in  the  war  of  1812,  for  the  com 
manding  proportions  our  commercial  marine  had  assumed 
when  the  unhappy  rebellion  enabled  England  to  drive  it 
from  the  sea,  and  for  the  ability  of  our  merchants  to  fur 
nish  the  Government  promptly  with  adequate  transporta 
tion  for  troops  and  munitions  of  war  and  to  maintain  a 


DOMIXICA.  431 

substantial  blockade  of  more  than  two  thousand  miles  of 
coast.* 

The  acquisition  of  San  Domingo  would  bring  the  terri 
tory  of  that  republic  within  the  influence  of  this  venera 
ble  arid  wholesome  law,  and  thus  do  more  to  stimulate  ship 
building  and  expand  the  commerce  of  the  country  than 
could  be  done  by  giving  effect  to  the  wisest  suggestions 
upon  the  subject  that  have  been  brought  before  the  House 
by  bill  or  report  since  the  close  of  the  rebellion. 

No  gentleman  who  has  not  given  special  attention  to  this 
question  can  have  any  idea  of  the  proportion  our  trade 
with  the  West  India  islands  bears  to  our  entire  foreign 
commerce.  Whether  tested  by  the  amount  we  import 
from  each  country,  or  by  the  total  of  our  imports  and  ex 
ports  to  and  from  each  country,  our  trade  with  the  West 
India  islands  stands  second;  that  with  the  United  King 
doms  of  England,  Scotland,  and  Ireland  alone  exceeding 
it.  It  is  true  that  our  exports  to  France  exceed  our  ex 
ports  to  the  West  Indies ;  but  our  imports  from  the  islands 
are  more  than  fifty  per  cent,  in  advance  of  those  from 
France.  The  countries  having  dominion  over  these  islands 
are  careful  to  so  regulate  their  trade  that  while  the 
American  people  may  be  the  chief  consumers  of  the  raw 
materials  produced  by  their  colonies,  their  own  fields,  fac 
tories  and  workshops,  and  not  ours,  shall  supply  them 
with  cereals  and  the  productions  of  agricultural  and  manu- 

*  The  wisdom  of  this  law  is  receiving  a  new  illustration  :  notwithstanding  the 
immense  amount  of  cotton  and  other  bulky  products,  formerly  dependent  on 
water  transportation  that  are  now  carried  by  rail,  and  our  exclusion  by  England's 
protective  system  of  subsidies,  from  equal  chances  in  foreign  commerce,  ship 
building  and  the  production  of  marine  enginery  are  reviving.  In  his  report 
to  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  January  10th,  1871,  Mr.  Joseph  Nimmo,  jr., 
Chief  of  Tonnage  Division,  says  : 

"  Our  coastwise,  or  home  commerce,  is  confined  exclusively  to  American  vessels 
by  the  law  of  1817,  [which  renews  and  extends  the  provisions  of  the  act  of  1789] 
a  similiar  policy  in  regard  to  home  commerce  being  maintained  by  almost  every 
other  commercial  nation  on  the  globe.  In  this  branch  of  our  shipping  we  enjoy 
a  fair  degree  of  prosperity,  and  to-day  our  coastwise  marine  is  larger  and  more 
prosperous  than  that  of  any  other  nation.  Our  entire  steam  tonnage,  embracing 
the  Atlantic  and  Pacific  coasts,  the  Mississippi  river  and  its  tributaries,  and  the 
northern  lakes,  exceeds  the  total  steam  marine  of  Great  Britain,  home  and  for 
eign  combined." 

The  facts  reported  by  Mr.  Nimmo  show  that  protection  by  inducing  the  rapid 
development  of  our  resources,  and  quickening  and  augmenting  our  home  trade, 
has  increased  the  demand  for  tonnage.  Under  the  lowest  rate  of  duties  we  have 
had  since  July,  1812,  the  tonnage  built  in  each  year,  as  appears  by  his  report,  was 
as  follows : 

In  1857,  182,841 ;  in  1858,  145,827 ;  in  1859,  75,081  j  in  1860,  115,841.  While 
under  the  highest  tariff  we  have  ever  had,  the  tonnage  built  in  each  year  has 
been  as  follows:  in  1867,  196,343;  in  1868,  196,962;  in  1869,  164,388;  in  1870, 
185,851.  Average  uuder  the  low  tariff  129,8'J7i  tons,  under  the  high  tariff,  185, 
886  tons. 


432 


DOMINICA. 


facturing  skill  and  industry.  In  order  that  gentlemen 
may  have  the  subject  fairly  and  fully  before  them,  I  pre 
sent  a  statement  of  the  commerce  of  the  United  States 
with  all  other  countries  for  the  year  ending  June  30,  1870, 
as  shown  by  the  report  of  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury 
on  commerce  and  navigation.  It  is  as  follows. 


Countries. 

Imports. 

Exports. 

Total. 

England  

$147,352,493 

$262,288,129 

$409,640,622 

7,444,304 

8,283,207 

15  727  511 

Ireland  

247,075 

8  593  531 

8  840  606 

West  Indies  

71,620,106 

35,075  591 

106,695,697 

France  

48,087,410 

54  834  609 

102  922  019 

Mexico,  Central  and  South  America.. 
Hamburg,  Bremen,  Prussia,  and  North 
Germany  

57,430,749 
27,397,958 

28,688,550 
42,747,854 

86-,119,299 
70  145  812 

Dominion  of  Canada  and  other  British 
possessions  in  North  America  
China  

41,089,801 
14  628  487 

26,849,324 
9  040  066 

67,939,125 
23  668  553 

Spain  

3,638,345 

9,782,403 

13,420  748 

Italy  

6  641  664 

6  474  653 

13  116  317 

British  East  Indies  

10,050,834 

243,648 

10,294  482 

Belgium  ...        

3  141,074 

7  055  634 

10  196  708 

Holland  

1,344,922 

6  399,835 

7,744  757 

Spanish  possessions  not  named  above. 
Russia  

6,685,686 
1,581,637 

221,799 
4  194360 

6,907,485 
5  775  997 

Japan  

4,183,365 

1,529.714 

5,713  079 

Gibraltar  

48,535 

4  071  293 

4  119  828 

Australia 

278  964 

3  466  575 

3  745  5'J>9 

Turkey  

678,718 

2  578  314 

3  257  032 

British  possessions  in  Africa 

1  836  070 

1  378  691 

3  214  761 

Dutch  East  Indies  

2,550,692 

158  636 

2  709  328 

Sandwich  Islands. 

1  144  248 

868  416 

2  012  664 

Austria  . 

371,409 

1  208  697 

1  580  106 

Portugal     .            . 

303  997 

1  565  963 

1  869  960 

Sweden  and  Norway  

1,180,741 

105  532 

1  286  273 

French  possessions  not  above  named. 
Liberia  

200,929 
104,605 

377,667 
151  442 

578,596 
259  047 

British  possessions  not  named  above. 
Portuguese  possessions    do.    do. 
Greece          .        .         . 

191,378 
42,477 
80  001 

64,237 
200,816 

255,715 
243,293 

80  DIM 

All  other  countries  and  ports.  . 

798,913 

1  017  016 

1  815  929 

Total  

$462,377  587 

$529  519  302 

$991  896  889 

EFFECT   OF  THE   ACQUISITION   UPON   SLAVERY. 

Some  of  my  friends  who  remember  the  energy  with 
which  I  have  hitherto  opposed  the  acquisition  of  southern 
territory  may  deem  me  inconsistent  in  advocating  earnestly, 
as  I  do,  the  acquisition  of  San  Domingo ;  but  if  they  will 
listen  for  a  moment  they  will,  I  think,  perceive  that  1  could 


DOMINICA.  433 

not  maintain  my  consistency  and  do  otherwise.  Believing, 
as  I  have  long  done,  that  commerce,  to  be  generally  and 
enduringly  profitable  to  both  parties,  must  cross  parallels 
of  latitude  and  not  run  upon  them,  I  have  believed  that  it 
would  add  to  the  completeness  of  our  country  to  acquire 
tropical  or  semi-tropical  territory  with  the  people  of  which 
we  might  exchange,  under  our  own  revenue  system,  with 
out  the  interposition  of  duties,  the  products  of  our  northern 
fields  and  workshops  for  the  many  commodities  which  they 
produce  but  which  we  cannot,  and  of  which  we  are  large 
consumers.  But,  sir,  notwithstanding  these  convictions, 
and  the  fact  that  T  was  a  member  of  the  Democratic  party, 
I  opposed  the  annexation  of  Texas,  was  hostile  to  the 
armed  occupation  of  Yucatan,  as  suggested  by  President 
Polk  in  his  message  of  April  29,  1848,  and  regarded  the 
Ostend  manifesto  and  other  efforts  to  acquire  Cuba,  as  out 
rages  upon  humanity  and  our  republican  institutions. 

I  did  not  stop  to  consider  the  constitutionality  of  these 
measures.  They  were  projected  in  pursuance  of  prece 
dents  which,  though  confessedly  indefensible  on  constitu 
tional  grounds,  had  vindicated  themselves  to  the  judgment 
of  the  country,  the  acquisition  of  the  Louisiana  territory 
and  the  Floridas.  My  hostility  to  them  did  not,  there 
fore,  rest  on  constitutional  scruples,  but  upon  the  fact 
that  they  were  efforts  to  extend  the  area  of  slavery 
and  to  perpetuate  that  accursed  institution.  They  were  all 
favorite  measures  of  the  Democratic  party,  whose  degene 
rate  leaders  array  themselves  against  the  acquisition  of 
San  Domingo,  and  have  resisted  with  all  their  power  the 
ordering  of  a  commission  to  inquire  into  the  propriety  of 
accepting  dominion  over  it.  Absurdly — I  had  almost  said 
impiously — they  claim  to  be  the  successors  of  Jefferson 
and  Jackson,  but  do  not  believe  in  the  expansion  of  our 
country  and  its  manifest  destiny.  They  are  purblind  and 
without  faith  in  the  capacity  of  man  for  self-government, 
and  I  apprehend  that  they  and  I  have  changed  grounds  on 
this  question  for  the  same  reason.  They  resist  the  acqui 
sition  of  San  Domingo  because  it  will  extend  the  area  of 
freedom  and  give  republican  institutions,  common  schools, 
a  free  press,  our  laws,  language,  literature,  and  all  the 
appliances  of  modern  civilization  to  a  tropical  people,  most 
of  whom  are  of  African  descent,  while  I  give  it  my  sup 
port  for  this  as  chief  among  a  thousand  reasons,  each  one 
of  which  is,  in  my  judgment,  conclusive. 
28 


434  DOMINICA. 

The  people  of  the  United  States  have  waded  through  a 
sea  of  blood  and  encumbered  themselves  and  their  poster 
ity  with  mountains  of  debt  in  abolishing  human  slavery  and 
making  our  institutions  throughout  our  broad  limits  homo 
geneous  and  harmonious  with  the  fundamental  principles 
that  underlie  them.  And  yet,  sir,  we  are  to-day  the  sup 
port  and  buttress  of  slavery  wherever  it  exists  upon  the 
continent  or  islands  of  America,  as  we  must  continue  to  be 
until  we  shall  acquire  tropical  territory,  on  which  to  grow 
coffee  and  sugar,  and  tobacco  equal  to  that  of  Cuba.  By 
the  acquisition  of  San  Domingo,  and  by  no  other  peaceable 
means,  we  can  overthrow  both  slavery  and  Spanish  supre 
macy  in  Cuba,  for  we  consume  fully  seventy  per  cent,  of 
her  exports,  every  pound  of  which  might  be  produced  by 
free  labor  in  San  Domingo. 

Few  gentlemen  have  probably  considered  the  question 
in  this  connection,  and  I  beg  leave  to  invite  attention  to 
a  few  facts  illustrative  of  its  importance.  But  before 
doing  so,  permit  me  to  suggest  that  San  Domingo  pro 
duces  large-grained  white  coffee  equal  to  that  of  Java, 
and  vastly  superior  to  the  green  coffee  of  Brazil,  with 
sugars,  molasses,  and  melada  equal  in  quality  to  those  of 
Cuba,  and  tobacco  which  compares  favorably  with  the 
best  smoking  tobacco  from  the  finest  fields  of  that  island; 
and  that  were  the  production  of  these  articles  stimulated 
by  the  sense  of  security  that  would  be  imparted  by  our 
acquisition  of  her  territory  and  by  the  admission  of  her 
productions  to  our  ports  free  of  duty,  it  would  cause 
the  transfer  of  the  American  and  other  foreign  capital 
now  employed  in  Cuba  to  San  Domingo,  and  thereby 
people  the  latter  and  increase  her  productions  and  de 
prive  Cuba  of  the  power  to  support  the  Spanish  army, 
which  holds  her  in  subjection,  or  to  make  the  con 
tributions  toward  the  support  of  the  Spanish  monarchy, 
which  now  regards  her  as  its  most  profitable  appendage. 

Cuba  owes  its  commercial  importance  to  the  fact  that 
San  Domingo  has  been  distracted  and  desolated  by  war 
and  oppression  from  the  year  of  its  discovery  to  the  pre 
sent  date.  Hispaniola,  as  San  Domingo  was  first  called, 
was  once  the  most  fertile,  most  highly  cultivated,  and 
most  productive  of  all  the  West  India  islands ;  but  she 
has  relapsed  into  a  wilderness  and  would  present  to  the 
enterprise  that  would  seek  her  fields,  under  the  sense  of  se 
curity  imparted  by  American  law  and  administration,  as 


DOMINICA.  435 

fertile  and  virgin  a  soil  as  she  did  to  the  followers  of  Co 
lumbus  nearly  four  centuries  ago. 

The  population  of  the  entire  island  in  1492-93  was  be 
lieved  to  exceed  a  million,  but  such  were  the  cruelty  and 
rapacity  of  the  Spaniards  that  an  enumeration  made  in 
1507  showed  that  the  native  population  had  been  reduced 
by  the  exhausting  labors  demanded  from  the  enslaved 
natives  in  the  unventilated  gold  mines,  and  the  barba 
rous  means  by  which  their  labor  was  enforced,  to  sixty 
thousand.  Another  enumeration,  made  by  an  officer 
known  as  the  distributor  of  Indians,  in  1514,  showed  that 
the  number  had  been  reduced  to  fourteen  thousand;  and 
the  history  of  the  island  from  these  early  dates  to  the 
close  of  the  war  between  Hayti  and  Dominica  is  but  a 
continuous  story  of  wrong,  outrage,  and  desolation.  After 
consulting  the  best  authorities  to  which  I  have  access,  I 
estimate  the  entire  population  of  the  island  at  this  time 
at  from  one  million  to  twelve  hundred  thousand,  of  which 
number  not  more  than  twenty  per  cent,  are  within  the 
limits  of  San  Domingo. 

The  natives  welcomed  Columbus  on  his  return  from 
Spain  with  presents,  consisting  chiefly  of  great  quantities 
of  gold,  and  in  the  course  of  his  progress  through  the  is 
land,  in  1495,  in  grateful  return  he  imposed  tribute  on  all 
of  them  above  the  age  of  fourteen,  requiring  each  one  to 
pay  quarterly  a  certain  quantity  of  gold  or  twenty-five 
pounds  of  cotton.  It  is  recorded  by  Captain  James  Bir- 
ney,  in  his  History  of  the  Buccaneers  of  America,  that 
to  prevent  evasion  of  paying  this  tribute  Columbus  caused 
u  rings  or  tokens  to  be  produced,  in  the  nature  of  re 
ceipts,  which  were  given  to  the  islanders  on  their  paying 
the  tribute,  and  any  islander  found  without  such  a  mark 
in  his  possession  was  deemed  not  to  have  paid,  and  was 
proceeded  against." 

In  a  recent  conversation  with  an  intelligent  merchant 
of  Philadelphia,  who  has  spent  many  years  in  Cuba  and 
San  Domingo,  I  said  to  him.  "  What  would  be  the  effect 
of  American  occupation  of  San  Domingo,  or  its  acquisi 
tion  by  us,  upon  the  productions  and  commerce  of  the  is 
land  ?  "  To  which  he  replied : 

"In  five  years  from  the  occurrence  of  such  an  event  San  Do 
mingo  will  have  resumed  her  former  station  among  the  producing 
and  commercial  countries  of  the  world,  and  will  have  become  the 
wealthiest  and  most  prosperous  island  in  the  Archipelago.  Under 
such  new  circumstances  it  will  far  exceed  the  Cuba  of  to-day.  San 


436  DOMINICA. 

Domingo  is  in  my  judgment  worth  five  times  what  Cuba  is  worth. 
Prior  to  the  revolution  of  1789  and  1790,  San  Domingo  was  the 
wealthiest  American  colonial  possession  owned  by  any  nation.  The 
French  part  was  immensely  prosperous,  although  the  French  had 
kept  it  but  a  few  years.  I  have  not  the  figures  at  hand,  but,  having 
examined  them,  assure  you  that  the  exports  of  coffee,  tobacco, 
sugar,  indigo,  cocoa,  and  other  productions  sustain  my  assertion. 
The  Spanish  side  was  also  very  prosperous.  In  fact,  the  whole  is 
land  was  in  a  prosperous  condition,  and  the  mines  were  yielding 
large  quantities  of  gold.  Since  the  revolution  of  1790,  when  the 
blacks  expelled  the  French  from  San  Domingo,  the  condition  of  the 
country  has  retrograded,  and  very  little  progress  has  since  been 
made  in  Hayti." 

In  view  of  these  facts  we  may  certainly  regard  the  soil 
of  Dominica  as  virgin,  and  by  embracing  it  under  our 
jurisdiction  do  for  the  wealth  and  commerce  of  the  world 
what  Columbus  and  their  Catholic  majesties  might  have 
done  could  they  have  founded  a  liberal  republic  whose 
affairs  should  be  so  administered  as  to  promote  the  wel 
fare  of  all  the  inhabitants  of  the  island. 

The  march  of  our  prosperity  has  marked  and  measured 
the  prosperity  of  the  ruling  classes  in  Cuba.  In  1820  she 
produced  but  fifty  thousand  tons  of  sugar,  and  in  1868,  to 
meet  our  increased  wants,  she  produced  nine  hundred 
thousand  tons.  The  increase  has  always  been  in  propor 
tion  to  the  increasing  market  our  country  afforded.  It 
was  to  supply  our  market  that  she  maintained  the  slave 
trade  with  Africa,  and  still  patronizes  the  equally  inhuman 
and  murderous  traffic  in  coolies.  Enriched  by  our  patro 
nage  she  employs  to-day  both  of  these  execrable  agencies 
in  our  service.  Let  me  prove  this.  She  ships  her  sugar 
in  the  following  proportions :  seventy  per  cent,  directly 
to  the  United  States ;  twenty-two  per  cent,  to  Great  Bri 
tain  direct,  and  to  Falmouth  or  a  market ;  two  per  cent. 
to  Spain,  (a  large  estimate);  and  six  per  cent,  to  other 
countries  of  Europe  and  to  South  America. 

I  have  said,  sir,  that  Cuba  has  maintained  and  does 
maintain  the  slave  trade  and  the  coolie  trade  in  order  to 
supply  our  wants.  More  and  worse  than  this,  prior  to 
1861  she  imported  her  victims  chiefly  under  our  flag, 
though  our  law  declared  the  slave  trade  to  be  piracy. 
Spain  had  bound  herself  by  treaty  with  England  to  abo 
lish  the  slave  trade,  for  doing  which  she  received  what  she 
deemed  ample  compensation;  yet  slaves  continued  to  be 
introduced  clandestinely  under  the  Spanish  flag,  under  the 
administration  of  every  captain  general ;  but  the  favorite 
flag  of  the  slave-trader  was  the  stars  and  stripes,  because 


DOMINICA. 


437 


vessels  bearing  it  were  exempt  from  search  by  British 
cruisers  on  the  coast  of  Africa.  The  execution  of  the 
slave-trader,  Gordon,  at  New  York,  in  1861,  put  a  stop  to 
the  use  of  our  flag  to  cover  this  unholy  traffic.  Since 
then  comparatively  few  slaves  have  been  introduced  into 
Cuba,  but  the  number  of  coolies  imported  annually  has 
greatly  increased. 

OUR   RESPONSIBILITY,  AND   HOW   WE   MAY   AVOID   IT. 

Such  are  our  responsibilities ;  and  it  is  now  in  our 
power  to  control  the  whole  subject,  not  by  ravishing  Na- 
both's  vineyard,  but  by  confirming  his  title  thereto  and 
enabling  him  to  enjoy  in  serene  confidence  his  vine  and 
fig-tree. 

The  duty  of  two  cents  a  pound  imposed  by  our  laws 
on  raw  sugar  with  those  on  molasses,  melada,  tobacco, 
and  other  productions  common  to  both  islands  would 
make  it  so  much  more  profitable  to  produce  them  in  San 
Domingo  than  in  Cuba  that  the  Spanish  despots  and  native 
slaveholders  who  govern  that  island  would  have  no  need 
for  new  victims,  but  would  find  a  steadily  diminishing 
market  for  the  crops  grown  by  those  they  now  hold  in 
bondage. 

The  duties  on  imports  from  Cuba  into  this  country  dur 
ing  the  fiscal  year  ending  June  30,  1870,  all  of  which 
could  have  been  raised  by  free  labor  in  San  Domingo, 
amounted  to  §32,268,750,  and  the  value  of  the  imports  were 
$52,964,225.  This  statement  embraces  only  sugar,  molas 
ses,  melada,  tobacco,  and  cigars,  which,  though  the  princi 
pal,  are  not  our  only  imports  from  Cuba.  The  whole 
could  have  been  grown  in  San  Domingo,  together  with 
immense  quantities  of  coffee,  cocoa,,  indigo,  and  the  valu 
able  woods  of  the  island.  The  following  table  shows 
the  amount  of  each  of  the  commodities  named  that 
we  imported  from  Cuba  during  the  last  fispal  year,  the 
value  thereof,  and  the  duty  to  which  they  were  subject  at 
three  cents  per  pound  of  sugar,  eight  cents  per  gallon  on 
molasses,  and  three  cents  per  pound  on  melada : 


Quantity. 

Sugar.  Ibs.... 801,633,343 
Molasses,  gals.  45,084,152 
Melada,  Ibs. .  .  35,828,771 
Tobacco     and 
cigars 


Value. 

$38,086,448 
9,696,783 
1,247,249 


Duty. 

$24,049,000 
3,606,732 
1,074,863 


3,933,745          3,538,155 


$52,964,225      $32,268,750 


438  DOMINICA. 

I  need  not  further  elaborate  this  point  to  merchant  or 
philanthropist,  for  every  man  who  will  dispassionately 
consider  the  facts  presented  will  admit  that,  were  San 
Domingo  free,  and  her  people  strengthened  by  the 
sense  of  security  that  would  be  derived  from  American 
protection  against  Haytian  or  other  invasion,  and  were  her 
savannas  and  hill-sides  cultivated,  as  they  then  might  be, 
with  modern  appliances  and  American  energy,  slavery 
would  cease  to  be  valuable  to  Cuba,  and  Spain  would  be 
divested  of  interest  in  her  as  a  colony.  This  is  the  age 
of  commerce,  and  the  laws  of  trade  are  invincible.  By 
accepting  San  Domingo  we  can  peaceably  emancipate  the 
whole  archipelago,  and  secure  to  those  of  our  people 
whose  constitution  fits  them  for  tropical  homes  possession 
and  the  peaceable  enjoyment  of  the  most  productive  island 
of  the  world. 

EXTENT    TO   WHICH    WE    SUPPORT    SLAVERY    IN  FOREIGN 
COUNTRIES. 

I  have  said  that,  notwithstanding  the  sacrifices  we  made  in 
abolishing  slavery,  we  are  its  support  and  buttress  through 
out  the  world.  We  cannot  ascertain  precisely  the  total 
amount  of  slave  products  imported  into  this  country  dur 
ing  the  last  fiscal  year,  but  I  find  enough  in  the  four  lead 
ing  articles  mentioned,  together  with  coffee,  to  demonstrate 
the  truth  of  my  proposition,  and  to  show,  by  the  amount 
of  duties  collected  from  these  articles,  that  if  we  could  pro 
duce  them  within  the  limits  of  our  revenue  system,  as  San 
Domingo  would  be  if  accepted  by  us,  we  could  overthrow 
slavery  on  every  island  of  the  archipelago,  and  so  far  im 
pair  its  value  in  Brazil  as  to  make  emancipation  probable. 
The  value  of  slave-grown  productions  imported  from  Cuba, 
Porto  Kico,  and  Brazil  during  that  year  was  $79,414,049, 
being  seventeen  per  cent,  of  the  entire  imports  of  the 
country,  and  the  amount  of  duties  on  them  $45,930,374,  or 
nearly  twenty -four  per  cent,  of  the  total  duties  collected  for 
the  year. 

The  following  statement  exhibits  the  amount  and  value 
of  the  articles  named  which  we  imported  from  slave-labor 
countries  during  the  last  fiscal  year,  and  the  amount  of 
duties  collected  thereon.  Of  those  from  Cuba,  which  I  have 
already  given  in  detail,  I  refer  but  to  the  value  and  amount 
of  duties: 


DOMINICA.  439 

Cuba:                                                     Value.  Duty. 

Total $52,964,225  $32,268,750 

Porto  Rico  : 

Sugar,  Ibs 130,706,182      6,081,072  3,921,185 

Molasses,  gals 7,119,928      2,046,172  569,594 

Brazil : 

Coffee,  Ibs 183,413456    18,322,580  9,170,672 


$79,414,049  $45,930,201 


As  I  have  said,  Mr.  Speaker,  San  Domingo  is  capable 
of  producing  an  equal  amount  of -all  the  commodities  em 
braced  in  this  statement ;  and  she  can  do  this  without  im 
pairing  her  capacity  to  export  mahogany,  satin,  and  other 
woods  for  furniture,  indigo,  and  a  considerable  list  of  dye- 
woods.  That  portion  of  the  island  which  belongs  to  the 
Dominican  Eepublic  could  support  a  population  of  five 
million  people  and  an  immense  export  trade,  yet  the  ex 
ports  of  the  entire  island,  embracing  Hayti  and  San  Do 
mingo,  to  this  country  for  the  last  year  were  but  $979,655 
of  which  $419,700,  or  about  four-ninths,  came  to  us  in 
foreign  vessels.  The  people  of  Dominica  are  not  only  with 
out  machinery,  but  without  the  simplest  tools  for  agriculture 
or  the  arts.  There  is  not  an  iron  plow  within  the  limits 
of  the  republic  nor  the  simplest  form  of  a  saw-mill,  though 
among  the  leading  exports  are  mahogany,  lignum-vifce, 
fustic,  logwood,  lance,  satin,  and  other  woods ;  and  it  is 
impossible  to  estimate  what  would  be  the  value  and  extent 
of  the  productions  of  the  country  under  the  application  of 
modern  improvements  in  science,  agricultural  machinery, 
and  the  processes  for  manufacturing  sugar  and  reducing 
fine  woods  to  slab  and  veneer,  or  the  stimulus  that  would 
be  given  to  American  ship-building,  the  production  of 
agricultural  and  other  implements,  and  to  our  carrying 
trade  and  commerce,  by  the  development  of  the  resources 
of  this  island  by  American  intelligence  and  enterprise. 

FALSE    POSITION   OF   THE    DEMOCRACY   OX   THIS    SUBJECT. 

Those  who  lead  the  Democratic  party  and  claim  to  have 
inherited  the  patriotism  and  wisdom  of  Jefferson  and  Jack 
son  cannot  see  that  any  advantage  is  to  result  to  the 
country  from  the  acquisition  of  San  Domingo.  They  can 
not  even  tolerate  inquiry  into  the  propriety  thereof.  They 
dread  territorial  expansion,  and  would  rather  let  our  ocean 


44:0  DOMINICA. 

commerce  perish  and  the  country  remain  tributary  to 
Spain  and  Brazil  than  incur  the  risk  of  accepting  San 
Domingo  from  a  people  who  seek  peace  and  security 
by  adopting  our  institutions  and  identifying  their  for 
tunes  and  fate  with  ours.  Could  anything  be  more 
absurd  than  the  pretentious  claim  of  these  'timid  and 
purblind  beings  to  be  inspired  by  the  spirit  of  Jefferson 
and  Jackson  ? 

There  was  never  a  day  in  the  life  of  the  Democratic 
party,  before  slavery  was  abolished,  on  which  it  would  not 
gladly  have  availed  itself  of  an  opportunity  to  secure  un 
restricted  and  direct  trade  with  the  West  India  islands, 
and  to  plant  upon  the  grandest  of  them  an  outpost  of  our 
country  as  a  matter  of  convenience  and  safety  in  time  of 
war.  Worthy  and  respected  as  was  General  Lewis  Cass, 
he  was  never  regarded  as  among  the  far-sighted  and 
courageous  leaders  of  his  party.  There  were  always  those 
who  would  gladly  have  elevated  him  to  the  Presidency, 
yet  few  regarded  him  as  preeminently  qualified  to  leud 
public  opinion  or  shape  the  destinies  of  a  nation.  Ho  was 
characterized  by  a  broad  measure  of  good  practical  sense, 
but  not  by  keen  foresight ;  yet  he  foresaw  more  of  the  re 
sults  of  the  last  quarter  of  a  century  than  these  men,  who 
have  lived  through  it  and  witnessed  all  its  stirring  events, 
are  even  now  able  to  see. 

The  influence  that  steam  was  to  exercise  in  ocean  com 
merce  and  naval  warfare  had  been  but  dimly  foreshadowed 
in  1848 ;  yet,  on  the  10th  of  May,  in  that  year,  General 
Cass  addressed  the  Senate  of  the  United  States  in  support 
of  Mr.  Folk's  proposition  to  take  armed  occupation  of 
Yucatan,  in  order,  as  was  their  theory,  to  prevent  England 
from  getting  possession  thereof,  and  to  countervail  her  in 
fluence  in  setting  up  the  Mosquito  king.  There  had  then 
been  no  contest  between  Ericsson's  Monitor  and  the  Merri- 
\nac.  France  and  England  had  no  navy  of  ponderous  iron 
hips.  The  bulky  commerce  of  the  world  was  still  carried 
n  wooden  vessels,  under  sail.  Yet  General  Cass  foresaw 
what,  as  I  have  said,  the  blind  leaders  of  the  Democratic 
party  are  incapable  of  perceiving  to-day.  They  have  not 
yet  discovered  that  depots  for  fuel  are  a  paramount  ne 
cessity  for  commercial  nations,  and  that  without  them 
steam  navigation  must  be  circumscribed  and  inefficient ; 
but  in  the  speech  to  which  I  have  referred  General  Casa 
said : 


DOMINICA.  411 

"  The  application  of  steam-power  to  armed  vessels  has  introduced 
an  improvement  which  may  occasion  an  entire  change  in  naval  war 
fare.  It  is  difficult  to  foresee  its  consequences,  or  the  effect  it  may 
hereafter  produce.  One  thing,  however,  is  certain,  that  armed  steam 
vessels,  of  a  size  and  draught  suitable  to  the  navigation  they  are 
designed  to  encounter,  will  take  a  decisive  part  in  naval  operations. 
Depots  for  fuel  become,  therefore,  of  paramount  necessity  for  com 
mercial  nations.  Without  them  their  steam  navigation  will  be 
circumscribed  and  inefficient.  With  them,  to  furnish  the  supplies 
required  to  vessels  as  they  call  for  them,  the  world  may  be  circum 
navigated,  and  steam-power  everywhere  used.  Now,  sir,  we  have 
no  places  of  deposit  anywhere  but  at  home,  and  England  has  them 
everywhere.  She  has  selected  her  positions  for  that  purpose  with 
that  foresight  which  marks  her  character,  and  she  will  keep  them 
at  all  times  supplied  with  abundance  of  necessary  fuel.  The  advan 
tages  she  will  derive  from  this  system  of  policy  are  sufficiently 
obvious,  and  we  must  depend  upon  our  energy  to  meet  them  as  best 
we  can  when  the  proper  time  comes." 

Mr.  Speaker,  the  acquisition  of  San  Domingo  would  not 
only  increase  our  ocean  commerce  and  enable  us  to  rely 
mainly  upon  a  volunteer  navy  for  war  purposes,  but  it 
would  give  us  such  a  depot  and  coaling  station  as  could  be 
established  on  no  other  island  in  the  Caribbean  sea.  The 
Bay  of  Samana  is  unequaled  in  extent,  beauty,  and  safety, 
and  if  we  may  rely  on  the  report  of  General  McClellan,  the 
hills  around  it  are  filled  with  coal  suitable  for  the  pur 
poses  of  the  workshop  and  the  generation  of  steam,  and 
crowned  with  wood  fit  for  naval  purposes.  Man's  ex 
perience  discloses  no  want  for  which  nature  has  not  made 
ample  provision  ;  and  the  Bay  of  Samana,  in  its  extent  and 
safety  and  the  mineral  deposits  and  forests  of  timber  which 
surround  it,  seems  to  have  been  preordained  for  a  great 
naval  station,  and  one,  too,  that  would  give  the  nation 
to  which  it  might  belong  control  of  the  passages  through 
the  archipelago,  of  our  southern  coast  and  of  the  shores  of 
Central  and  the  northern  part  of  South  America. 

The  scheme  of  the  pro-slavery  Democracy  of  1848  for 
the  armed  occupation  of  Yucatan  having  failed,  and  the 
necessity  for  a  station  for  supplies  and  repairs  having 
pressed  itself  upon  the  attention  of  successive  Administra 
tions,  President  Pierce  ordered  then  Captain  since  General 
George  B.  McClellan  to  repair  to  the  Dominican  republic, 
inquire  into  and  report  upon  the  fitness  of  its  bays  and 
harbors  for  such  a  station.  A  copy  of  his  report  is  before 
me.  It  is  dated  August  27,  1854.  He  says  he  found  three 
good  harbors,  of  which  Samana  was  the  best,  the  others 


412  DOMINICA. 

being  Mansanilla  and  Ocoa.  He  found  excellent  oak  and 
yellow  pine  fit  for  use  in  naval  construction,  and  palm  and 
other  trees  adequate  for  the  construction  of  durable  wharves 
in  a  tropical  sea.  One  of  these,  the  name  of  which  escaped 
his  memory  before  he  made  his  report,  he  learned  was 
peculiarly  free  from  liability  to  attack  by  worms,  the 
special  foe  to  timber  when  exposed  to  salt  water  at  tropical 
temperature.  He  also  found  bituminous  coal  in  many 
places,  and  certifies  that  specimens  thereof  that  had  been 
exposed  to  the  weather  for  three  years  burned  well.*  As 
to  the  fitness  of  Samana  for  such  a  station,  he  says : 

"  The  best  harbors  in  the  republic  of  Dominica  are  those  of  Sa 
mana,  Mansanilla,  and  Ocoa. 

"  Ocoa,  nearly  in  the  middle  of  the  southern  coast  of  the  island,  is 
entirely  out  of  the  usual  track  of  navigation,  and  commands  nothing. 
Mansanilla,  on  the  northern  coast,  about  two-thirds  of  its  length  to 
the  westward,  is  too  far  from  the  Mona  passage,  is  somewhat  out  of 
the  way  from  the  passage  between  Cuba  and  Hayti,  and  is  badly 
situated  with  regard  to  the  line  of  reefs  extending  eastward  from  the 
Inagua  islands,  besides  having  dangerous  reefs  near  its  entrance. 

"  The  harbor  of  Samana  is  almost  directly  in  the  route  of  all  vessels 
using  the  Mona  passage,  and  gives  complete  command  of  that  very 
important  thoroughfare,  which  is  the  most  safely  approached,  and 
most  advantageous  in  its  position  with  regard  to  the  Spanish  main 
and  Caribbean  sea  of  all  the  frequented  passages. 

"  Having  reason  to  believe  that  it  possessed  all  the  requisite  pro 
perties,  and  great  advantages  over  the  others  with  regard  to  health 
and  defense,  I  devoted  all  my  time  and  attention  to  its  examination. 
The  bay  of  Samana,  extending  some  thirty  miles  from  east  to  west, 
and  from  nine  to  twelve  north  and  south,  is  formed  by  the  narrow 
peninsula  of  the  same  name.  The  entrance  for  vessels  drawing 
more  than  eight  feet  is  contracted  into  two  thousand  yards  by  a  broad 
coral  reef  extending  from  the  southern  shore  of  the  bay.  At  the 
north  point  of  the  reef  are  five  keys,  the  largest  containing  about  one 
hundred  acres,  the  smallest  a  mere  sand-bank ;  the  passage  for  vessels 
lies  between  the  most  northern  key  and  the  peninsula.  The  largest 
ships  of  the  line  can  enter  this  bay  with  the  utmost  ease,  arid  find 
secure  anchorage  within,  entirely  out  of  cannon  range  from  vessels 
outside  the  keys. 

"  The  anchorages  and  small  harbors  on  the  northern  side  of  the 
bay  near,  the  entrance  are  very  good,  and  have  excellent  holding- 
ground.  The  only  objection  to  this  bay  arises  from  the  rareness  of 
land  breezes  at  certain  seasons  of  the  year  at  least ;  so  that  it  is  diffi 
cult  for  large  vessels  to  sail  out,  as  the  channel  is  somewhat  narrow 
for  them  to  beat  through.  This  difficulty  can  be  remedied  by  the 
use  of  a  steam  tug,  by  kedging,  or  warping.  Were  the  channel  well 
4  buoyed  out,'  it  is  probable  that  a  ship  of  the  line  could,  in  case  of 
necessity,  beat  out.  With  respect  to  steamers,  there  is  no  obstacle 

*  This  coal  must  have  been  carried  there,  as  subsequent  examination  dis 
proves  the  existence  of  a  natural  deposit  thereop 


DOMINICA.  443 

in  the  way  of  their  entering  or  leaving  at  any  time  in  the  day  or 
night.  The  peninsula  of  Samana  is  almost  an  island  ;  for  at  its  base 
the  land  is  low  and  swampy,  much  cut  up  by  inlets,  and  overgrown 
with  mangrove  bushes.  The  approach  from  the  mainland  is  for  a 
league  and  a  half  over  a  narrow,  winding  path,  practicable  for  only 
one  man  at  a  time,  partly  under  water  to  the  armpits,  and  in  many 
places  overhead  in  mud  and  water  on  either  side. 

"  The  peninsula  itself  is  high  and  broken ;  the  hills  ranging  from 
a  few  hundred  to  two  thousand  feet  in  altitude,  exceedingly  steep, 
very  irregular  in  direction,  and  interspersed  with  narrow,  sloping 
valleys,  the  whole  covered  with  a  dense  growth  of  underbush,  vines, 
and  timber.  It  is  well  watered  by  small  mountain  streams.  The 
predominant  rock  is  a  limestone,  generally  porous,  but  often  occur 
ring  of  such  a  quality  as  to  form  a  good  building-stone  in  that  climate, 
and  in  localities  convenient  for  working." 

But  General  McClellan's  report  is  not  the  only  evidence 
furnished  by  Democratic  Administrations  while  statesmen 
of  sagacity  were  at  the  head  of  that  party  of  the  wisdom 
and  patriotism  of  President  Grant's  effort  to  acquire  San 
Domingo.  It  apears  that  Yucatan  was  not  sufficient  to 
satisfy  the  ambitious  desires  of  Mr.  Polk  and  his  adminis 
tration.  In  February,  1845,  he  sent  Mr.  John  Hogan  as 
"  the  special  agent  and  commissioner  of  the  United  States 
to  the  island  of  San  Domingo  or  Hayti."  The  duties  en 
joined  on  him  were  "particularly  to  inquire  into  and  re 
port  upon  the  present  condition,  capacity,  and  resources  of 
the  new  republic  of  Dominica."  Mr.  Hogan  having  per 
formed  his  duties  made  a  much  more  elaborate  and  in 
telligent  report  than  General  McClellan  submitted  to 
President  Pierce,  nine  years  later.  Let  me  quote  his  de 
scription  of  the  island  and  its  probable  future  relation  to 
the  international  affairs  of  the  world.  In  opening  his  re 
port  he  said : 

"  The  island  known  under  the  several  names  of  Hispaniola,  San 
Domingo,  and  Hayti  is,  as  is  well  known,  in  extent  among  the  largest, 
and  in  fertility  of  soil,  character,  and  quantity  of  its  productions, 
one  of  the  most  important  of  the  islands  of  the  West  Indies.  The 
central  position  which  it  occupies  in  that  archipelago,  separated  from 
Cuba  by  a  channel  of  only  forty  miles,  intermediate  between  Jamaica 
on  the  west  and  Porto  Kico  on  the  east,  its  vicinity  to  the  com 
mercial  ports  of  the  United  States;  the  provinces  of  Honduras  and 
Yucatan:  and  what  has  been  long  known  as  the  Spanish  main  of 
South  America,  confer  upon  it  a  political  importance  second  only  to 
its  commercial.  In  the  hands  of  a  powerful  and  enterprising  nation 
its  influence  would  be  felt  in  all  the  ramifications  of  human  concerns. 

"  This  island  is  again  peculiar  from  the  number  and  capacity  of  its 
harbors.  The  entire  coast  is  studded  with  deep  and  valuable  ports, 
and  intersected  with  rivers  penetrating  far  into  the  interior,  which 
render  all  its  resources,  natural  and  industrial,  available  in  augment- 


444  DOMINICA. 

ing  the  power  and  extending  the  commerce  of  the  nation  which 
might  either  acquire  the  power  of  sovereignty  over  it  or  become 
connected  with  it  in  the  relations  of  mutual  independence.  A  glance 
at  the  map  will  exhibit  at  once  to  your  eye  the  inestimable  value  of 
this  island,  and  its  commanding  position  in  a  military  arid  com 
mercial  point  of  view.  Independently  of  its  own  internal  resources, 
mineral  arid  agricultural,  its  position  renders  this  magnificent  island 
one  of  the  most  admirable  positions  which  the  world  can  exhibit  for 
a  commercial  emporium.  Its  vast  and  secure  bays  would  afford 
shelter  for  the  congregated  navies  of  the  world.  Its  situation 
renders  it  accessible  to.  the  most  important  marts  of  this  continent." 

Ifr  as  Mr.  Hogan  predicts,  the  influence  of  San  Domingo 
is  to  be  felt  in  all  the  ramifications  of  human  concerns, 
bad  it  not  better  be  under  the  inspiration  of  American  re 
publicanism  than  as  the  colony  of  any  of  the  despotic  or 
reactionary  Governments  of  Europe  ?  That  she  may  put 
forth  her  influence  wisely  and  for  the  good  of  mankind  I 
would  give  her  our  literature,  laws,  and  institutions,  and 
through  her  common  schools  begin  the  work  of  making 
our  language  that  of  the  people  of  the  entire  archipelago. 

But  let  us  hear  further  from  President  Folk's  commis 
sioner,  Mr.  Hogan,  as  to  the  importance  of  the  geographical 
position  and  the  grandeur  and  variety  of  her  material  re 
sources.  Kecurring  to  the  subject,  and  speaking  first  of 
the  whole  island,  lie  says : 

"  The  island,  which  has  of  late  years  resumed  in  the  hands  of  the 
blacks  its  original  name  of  Haiti,  or  Hayti,  was  usually  known  as 
San  Domingo  by  the  English  and  French,  and  as  Hispaniola  by  the 
Spaniards.  It  lies  about  southeast  of  the  island  of  Cuba,  from  which 
it  is  separated  by  a  channel  of  about  forty  miles  in  width  ;  eastwardly 
from  Jamaica,  which  is  at  the  distance  of  one  hundred  miles  ;  west- 
wardly  from  Porto  Rico,  distant  thirty  miles.  It  is  directly  south 
from  the  city  of  New  York,  which  is  about  fifteen  hundred  miles  re 
moved  ;  from  Charleston  and  Savannah,  about  nine  hundred  miles ; 
within  a  few  days'  sail  of  Nicaragua,  Yucatan,  and  Honduras,  and 
equally  convenient  to  Trinidad  and  the  northern  shores  of  the  South 
American  continent.  This  commanding  position,  in  both  a  political 
and  commercial  point  of  view,  is  materially  strengthened  by  the 
number  and  capacity  of  its  harbors.  The  Bay  of  Samana,  on  the 
eastern  extremity  of  the  island,  trends  into  the  interior  for  a  depth 
of  eight  leagues,  with  a  proportionate  width,  and  is  capable  of  hold 
ing  all  the  navies  of  the  world.  The  character  of  the  shores  of  this 
bay  and  the  noble  timber  which  covers  the  adjacent  country  furnish 
inexhaustible  means  for  repairing  or  even  building  ships  of  every 
dimension.  This  island  extends,  in  its  greatest  length,  nearly,  from 
east  to  west,  a  distance  of  about  three  hundred  miles,  and  from  north 
to  south  its  greatest  breadth  is  about  one  hundred  and  fifty  miles, 
with  a  superficial  area  of  thirty  thousand  square  miles.  Its  IridiaD 


DOMIXICA.  44:5 

name,  Hayti,  meaning  mountainous,  indicates  the  most  striking 
feature  in  its  physical  conformation,  the  most  elevated  points  rising 
to  the  height  of  about  six  thousand  feet  above  the  surrounding 
ocean.  The  hilly  region  is,  however,  intersected  with  numerous  val 
leys,  where  the  fertile  character  of  the  soil  and  a  genial  climate  pro 
duce  an  exuberance  of  the  most  valuable  and  diversified  vegetation. 
In  other  parts  of  the  island  extensive  natural  meadows  or  savannahs 
appear,  which  furnish  an  abundant  provision  for  large  quantities  of 
cattle  and  horses.  San  Domingo  is,  in  general,  well  watered  by 
numerous  rivers,  which  penetrate  into  the  interior  and  add  to  the 
productive  capacities  of  a  soil  of  unsurpassed  fertility.  The  irregular 
character  of  the  surface  and  the  greater  or  less  distance  from  the 
ocean  occasion  considerable  diversities  of  climate,  varying  from  the 
oppressive  tropical  heat,  which,  combined  with  a  humid  atmosphere, 
renders  some  parts  peculiarly  obnoxious  to  the  vomito  or  yellow 
fever,  to  the  elevated  mountain  ridges,  where  the  cold  is  sometimes 
found  to  be  unpleasant  to  those  habituated  to  the  more  enervating 
influences  of  the  tropics.  The  excessive  heat,  which  would  other 
wise  be  insupportable,  of  the  sea-board  is,  however,  delightfully 
tempered  by  the  sea  breeze,  which  regularly,  at  ten  o'clock  a.  in., 
lends  its  refreshing  influences  to  the  weary  and  exhausted  sufferers. 

"  Under  such  propitious  circumstances,  as  may  readily  be  supposed, 
the  vegetable  products  of  the  island  are  as  abundant  as  they  are  di 
versified  in  character.  Almost  all  the  productions  of  the  tropical 
and  temperate  zones  find  a  genial  soil  and  climate  in  some  part  of 
its  various  regions.  The  sugar-cane,  cotton,  tobacco,  rice,  and  cocoa 
are  grown  in  great  abundance ;  while  the  plantain,  vanilla,  potato, 
and  other  minor  articles  are  indigenous  to  the  soil.  The  moun 
tains  are  covered  with  valuable  timber,  among  which  are  especially 
to  be  noticed  the  mahogany,  satin-wood,  live-oak,  and  other  useful 
descriptions  of  tree. 

"  Nor  are  the  mineral  riches  of  this  island  less  important.  It  is 
well  known  that  from  the  period  of  its  discovery  by  the  Spaniards 
large  quantities  of  gold  have  been  extracted  from  the  soil,  chiefly, 
however,  by  washing  from  the  hills.  It  is  known  that  there  also  ex 
ist  the  most  copious  supplies  of  copper,  coal,  rock-salt,  iron  ore,  nitre, 
and  other  valuable  minerals.  These,  however,  owing  to  the  dis 
tracted  state  of  the  country,  have  been  imperfectly  developed. 

"  This  magnificent  island,  upon  which  nature  has  lavished  her 
choicest  treasures  with  a  profuse  hand,  has,  however,  been  the 
victim  of  all  the  misery  which  man  can  inflict  upon  his  brother  man. 
It  was  occupied  by  the  divided  authority  of  France  and  Spain,  the 
former  possessing" the  western  portion  and  the  latter  the  eastern 
part  of  the  island,  while  the  line  of  demarcation  between  them  was 
irregular,  extending  in  a  northerly  and  southwardly  course  across  it. 
The  part  belonging  to  Spain  extended  over  rather  a  greater  extent 
of  superfices  than  that  which  appertained  to  France. 

"  About  the  year  1789  the  island  had  perhaps  attained  its  highest 
condition  of  prosperity,  and  its  exports  were  then  deemed  more 
abundant  and  more  valuable  than  those  of  Cuba.  At  that  period 
broke  out  those  devastating  intestine  commotions  which  spread 
horror  and  misery  over  this  unfortunate  region,  marked  by  traits  of 
ferocity  and  a  depth  of  human  suffering  rarely  equaled  and  never 
surpassed.  The  black  population  of  the  French  moiety  of  the  island 


446  DOMINICA. 

rose  in  insurrection  against  their  masters ;  a  servile  war  raged  with 
all  its  terrors.  Armies,  the  pride  and  boast  of  France,  were  anni 
hilated  by  the  combined  influences  of  war  and  climate ;  the  negroes 
established  their  ascendency,  and  the  independency  of  the  Haytian 
republic  was  finally  recognized  by  the  French  monarch  in  1825,  in 
consideration  of  a  large  pecuniary  indemnity,  payable  to  the  former 
proprietors  of  the  soil. 

'•  It  is,  however,  to  be  remarked,  what  cannot  indeed  be  readily 
understood  and  has  not  been  satisfactorily  explained,  so  far  as  my 
information  extends,  that  although  the  political  authority  of  the 
blacks  had  been  extended  as  early  as  1821  over  the  Spanish  portion 
of  the  island,  so  that  it  was  wholly  subjugated  to  their  sway,  yet 
this  recognition  of  independence  by  France  is  in  terms  restricted 
to  the  French  part  of  the  island. 

"This  extension  of  the  black  authority  continued  without  inter 
mission  until  the  opening  of  the  year  1844,  when  the  inhabitants  of 
the  Spanish  portion  o  the  island  raised  the  standard  of  revolt,  threw 
off  the  ignominious  yoke  which  had  been  imposed  by  the  authorities 
of  Hayti,  arid  declared  their  independence.  The  republic  of  Do 
minica  was  then  constituted.  Since  that  period  the  war  between  the 
two  parties  has  been  continued,  but  the  new  comrnunity  has  thus 
far  successfully  maintained  its  independence,  has  organized  a  regular 
form  of  gorernrnent,  established  a  written  fundamental  constitution 
based  upon  republican  principles,  and  holds  out  the  best  founded 
prospects  of  triumphing  in  the  contest,  even  to  the  extent  of  ex 
tending  its  authority  throughout  the  entire  island. 

"  Such  was  the  origin,  and  in  brief  such  the  present  position  of 
the  new  republic,  to  which  I  have  had  the  honor  of  being  com 
missioned. 

"  The  territories  of  the  republic  are  those  which  formerly  belonged 
to  Spain,  and  constitute  about  a  moiety  of  the  island,  whether  we 
estimate  the  extent  of  country,  the  character  of  the  soil,  and 
generally  the  sources  of  wealth.  The  population  consists  of  about 
two  hundred  and  thirty  thousand,  of  whom  forty  thousand  are  blacks, 
and  over  one  hundred  thousand  are  whites." 

Such,  Mr.  Speaker,  is  San  Domingo,  the  true  Queen  of 
the  Antilles,  and  such  is  the  sad  story  of  her  people.  Her 
natural  wealth  is  boundless,  and  infinite  in  its  variety.  It 
is  also  exhaustless,  for  its  sources  are  perennial ;  yet  her 
impoverished  and  decimated  people  live  in  dread  un 
certainty,  which,  like  the .  shadow  of  impending  death, 
precludes  exertion  for  the  future.  In  view  of  her  resources 
and  her  many  capacious  bays  and  harbors,  she  should  be  the 
centre  of  a  world- wide  and  busy  commerce ;  but  her  bays 
and  harbors  are  rarely  shadowed  by  a  sail,  and  a  single 
steamer,  the  Tybee,  visiting  her  ports  but  once  a  month, 
suffices  for  the  greater  part  of  her  regular  trade  and  com 
munication  with  the  great  commercial  Eepublic  whose 
immediate  neighbor  she  is.  From  the  depths  of  their  des- 


DOMINICA.  447 

pair  the  people  of  the  republic  of  Dominica  implore  us  to 
remove  the  dread  shadow  under  which  they  live,  expose 
her  wealth  to  view,  and  cause  it  to  be  applied  to  the  uses 
of  mankind.  Moved  by  their  appeal,  and  instructed  by 
the  action  of  all  his  really  great  predecessors,  the  President 
proposes  to  the  country  to  bless  them  and  the  world  by 
granting  their  prayer ;  and  for  this  he  is  assailed  by  the 
puny  and  short-sighted  leaders  of  the  Democratic  party. 
Against  their  assaults  I  will  not  pause  to  defend  him.  He 
has  vindicated  to  the  world  and  history  the  singleness  and 
rectitude  of  his  purposes  by  the  selection  of  Benjamin  F. 
Wade,  Andrew  D.  White,  and  Samuel  G.  Howe,  as  com 
missioners  to  make  the  inquiries  ordered  by  Congress. 
Truer  men  than  these  he  could  not  have  named,  nor  men 
more  free  from  the  suspicion  of  liability  to  corrupt  or 
sinister  influences ;  and  President  Grant  may  well  express 
a  willingness  to  abide  the  issue  of  their  investigations,  con 
fident  that  it  will  justify  all  he  has  done,  and  result 
in  adding  the  tropical  wealth  of  San  Domingo  to  the 
mighty  resources  of  the  United  States,  and  in  the  revival 
and  expansion  of  our  languishing  Ocean  commerce. 


REVENUE  REFORM. 

SPEECH  DELIVERED  IN  THE  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
APRIL  18th,  1871. 

The  House  being  in  session — 

The  Speaker  said :  The  committees  having  been  called 
through,  the  regular  order  is  the  consideration  of  the  re 
solution  offered  yesterday  by  the  gentleman  from  New- 
Hampshire  [Mr.  Bell]  in  regard  to  public  expenditures 
and  taxation,  which  went  over  under  the  rule,  and  comes 
up  this  morning  for  discussion. 

After  speaking  some  time  in  support  of  the  resolution, 
Mr.  Cox  said :  I  yield  to  the  gentleman  from  Pennsylva 
nia  [Mr.  Kelley]. 

Mr.  Kelley.  Mr.  Speaker,  in  the  preamble  of  the  reso 
lution  of  the  gentleman  from  New  York*  there  are  ab 
stract  propositions  with  which  I  cordially  concur.  But  I 
desire  to  bring  to  the  attention  of  the  House,  and,  if  pos 
sible,  of  the  country,  one  proposition  contained  in  the 
resolution  which  seems  to  be  in  accordance  with  a  popular 
delusion.  It  declares  that  "this  House  disapproves  of  in 
ordinate  taxation  to  pay  off  immense  amounts  of  the  pub 
lic  debt  as  heretofore  practiced  by  the  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury." 

I  believe  this  side  of  the  House  disapproves  of  inordi 
nate  taxation  for  the  sake  of  the  speedy  payment  of  the 
debt ;  I  certainly  do.  But,  sir,  we  are  older  in  legislation 
than  the  gentleman  from  New  York,  and  have  more 
experience  in  the  management  of  affairs,  and  know 
that  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  has  imposed  no  taxes 
upon  the  people.  The  taxes  of  which  he  complains  are 
imposed  by  law,  and  not  by  order  of  the  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury,  who  has  had  nothing  to  do  with  them,  except 

*  Though  submitted  by  the  gentleman  from  New  Hampshire,  the  resolution 
was  understood  to  be  that  of  the  gentleman  from  New  York. 

448 


REVENUE   REFORM.  449 

to  see  that  they  are  efficiently  collected  and  that  the  funds 
derived  thereby  are  faithfully  applied. 

Let  me  call  the  attention  of  the  House  to  the  history 
of  this  question.  For  the  six  months  preceding  the  in 
auguration  of  General  Grant  and  the  installation  of  Se 
cretary  Boutwell  the  revenues  of  the  country  were  inade 
quate  to  meet  its  current  expenditures.  Each  month  for 
six  months  showed  a  declining  balance  in  *he  Treasury. 
After  the  4th  of  March,  1869,  however,  it  was  found  that 
this  was  reversed.  The  same  tariff  and  tax  laws  prevailed. 
No  increase  of  duty,  no  increase  of  internal  taxes;  yet 
it  was  found  that  taxes  which  had  been  insufficient 
for  the  current  expenses  of  the  Government  were,  under 
Republican  administration,  not  only  adequate  for  that 
purpose,  but  sufficient  to  justify  the  Government  in  be 
ginning  to  pay  the  public  debt.  Sir,  in  addition  to  pay 
ing  the  current  expenses,  Secretary  Boutwell  has  out  of 
these  taxes  paid  $204,000,000  of  the  public  debt  and  re 
duced  the  annual  payment  of  gold  interest  more  than 
twelve  million  dollars. 

More  than  that,  sir.  Congress,  at  its  last  session,  re 
pealed  internal  taxes  which  yielded  $55,000,000  annually 
and  duties  upon  imports  which  yielded  $23,000,000.  The 
total  repeal  of  duties  was  $26,000,000 ;  but  by  increase 
of  duty  on  certain  articles  it  is  believed  $3,000,000  addi 
tional  revenue  will  be  derived,  whereby  the  reduction 
will  be  diminished,  thus  making  a  total  reduction  of 
$78,000,000  on  the  annual  income  of  the  Government. 
And  yet,  with  that  reduction  of  the  sources  of  revenue,  the 
Secretary  of  the  Treasury  goes  on  paying  the  public  debt 
and  reducing  the  annual  interest  so  rapidly  that  the  gen 
tleman  and  many  Republicans  find  fault  with  him.  To 
what  use  would  he  have  the  Secretary  apply  the  money 
thus  collected  ?  Would  he  have  it  lie  dead  in  the  Trea 
sury?  Would  he  thus  withdraw  from  circulation  the 
money  collected  and  produce  embarrassment  and  a  com 
mercial  crisis  ?  By  buying  bonds  and  restoring  these 
funds  to  circulation  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  has 
not  only  reduced  our  debt  and  annual  interest,  but 
given  us  a  steadiness  in  financial  affairs  such  as  is  unpa 
ralleled  in  the  history  of  our  country  for  twenty-five 
years.  Gold  has  stood  for  months  between  110  and  111. 
Domestic  commerce,  foreign  trade  and  the  manufacturing 
industries  of  the  country  have  gone  on  more  steadily  and 
29 


450  REVENUE   REFORM. 

even-handedly  than  they  have  for  the  same  period  of  time 
in  a  quarter  of  a  century  preceding  it. 

Now,  sir,  I  agree  heartily  with  the  gentleman  that 
there  may  and  should  be  a  great  reduction  of  taxes ;  that 
the  income  of  the  Government  should  be  largely  reduced. 
I  insisted  during  the  last  Congress  that  the  reduction 
should  be  $100,000,000,  instead  of  $80,000,000,  at  which 
the  Committee  of  Ways  and  Means  aimed,  and  I  believe 
that  with  judicious  legislation,  to  be  devised  by  the  Com 
mittee  of  Ways  and  Means,  we  can  repeal  from  seventy- 
five  to  eighty  million  dollars  of  taxes  during  the  next 
session  and  still  go  on  paying  the  debt. 

Let  me  assure  the  gentleman  from  New  York  that  I  am 
"  in  dead  earnest "  for  the  abolition  of  the  internal  re 
venue  system  at  the  earliest  day  compatible  with  the 
maintenance  of  the  faith  and  credit  of  the  Government. 
I  am  for  freeing  the  American  people  from  the  system  of 
supervision,  inquisition,  and  espionage  it  necessarily  in 
volves,  and  which  is  so  disagreeable  to  them.  It  was  cal 
led  into  life  by  the  contingencies  of  the  war,  and  should 
be  abolished  as  soon  as  possible. 

Mr.  Brooks,  of  New  York.  With  the  gentleman's  per 
mission,  I  will  ask  him  a  question.  Admitting  the  fact 
that  we  are  receiving  now  from  taxes  an  income  which 
can  and  ought  to  be  reduced  seventy-five  or  eighty  mil 
lion  dollars,  why  not  do  it  now,  now,  now,  instead  of  put 
ting  it  off  to  January,  1873  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.  Because  we  are  in  the  last  day  of  the  ses 
sion  and  without  committees.  If  the  Committee  of  Ways 
and  Means  were  appointed  I  should  favor  charging  it  with 
an  investigation  and  revision  such  as  were  required  of  the 
committee  of  the  last  Congress,  of  which  the  gentleman 
from  New  York  and  I  were  members,  and  to  the  fidelity 
of  which  I  am  confident  he  will  bear  testimony,  although 
he  did  not  agree  in  the  conclusions  reported. 

Mr.  Cox.     I  wish  to  ask  a  question. 

Mr.  Kelley.     I  am  speaking  in  your  time. 

Mr.  Cox.  In  your  resolution  abolishing  internal  taxes 
did  you  not  except  out  of  it  spirits  and  tobacco  ? 

Mr.  Kelley.  No,  sir.  I  merely  indicated  that  they 
should  be  retained  as  subjects  of  taxation  so  long  as  any 
internal  taxes  were  required  for  the  maintenance  of  the 
Government, 


REVENUE   REFORM.  451 

Mr.  Cox.  And  by  what  machinery  did  the  gentleman 
propose  to  collect  the  tax  on  spirits  and  tobacco  ? 

Mr.  Kelky.  Why,  so  long  as  any  internal  taxes  are 
required,  I  would  collect  them  by  appropriate  machinery; 
but  I  would,  at  the  earliest  possible  day  compatible  with 
the  maintenance  of  the  faith  and  credit  of  the  Govern 
ment,  abolish  the  whole  system.* 

Mr.  Cox.  Then  the  gentleman  would  break  down  the 
internal  taxation  on  tobacco  and  on  whisky,  which  are 
always  regarded  as  proper  subjects  of  taxation ;  and  all 
the  machinery  of  the  inquisition,  all  the  odium  belonging 
to  the  internal  revenue  system,  he  would  keep  up  until 
the  very  last  moment — and  what  for? 

Mr.  Kelky.     What  last  moment  ? 

Mr.  Cox.  Well,  the  gentleman  does  not  explain  him 
self  clearly,  or  else  I  would  not  interrogate  him. 

Mr.  Kelky.  I  would,  as  I  have  said,  retain  these  taxes 
as  long  as  any  internal  taxes  are  necessary  to  the  mainte 
nance  of  the  faith  and  credit  of  the  Government,  and  not 
one  moment  longer. 

Mr.  Cox.  The  gentleman  did  not  intend,  therefore,  so 
long  as  he  cared  for  the  credit  of  the  Government,  to 
abolish  the  internal  revenue  tax  on  tobacco  and  on 
spirits  ;  and  everybody  knows  that  nearly  all  the  frauds 
on  the  internal  revenue  are  in  regard  to  these  two 
articles. 

Mr.  Kelky.  You  cannot  strike  down  a  system  which 
yields  $150,000,000,  as  the  internal  revenue  system  pro- 

*  INTERNAL  TAXES — REVENUE  REFORM. — Mr.  Kelley.  I  move  that  the 
rules  be  so  suspended  as  to  adopt  the  following  resolution  : 

Resolved,  That  this  House  reaffirms  the  resolution  adopted  on  the  12th  of  De 
cember,  1870,  by  the  House  of  Representatives  of  the  Fortieth  Congress,  declar 
ing  that  the  true  principle  of  revenue  reform  points  to  the  abolition  of  the  in 
ternal  revenue  system,  which  was  created  as  a  war  measure  to  provide  for 
extraordinary  expenses,  and  the  continuance  of  which  involves  the  employment, 
at  a  cost  of  millions  of  dollars  annually,  of  an  army  of  assessors,  collectors, 
supervisors,  detectives,  and  other  officers  previously  unknown,  and  requires  the 
repeal  at  the  earliest  day  consistent  with  the  maintenance  of  the  faith  and 
credit  of  the  Government  of  all  stamp  and  other  internal  taxes;  and  that  pro 
perly  adjusted  rates  shall  be  retained  on  distilled  spirits,  tobacco,  and  malt 
liquors  so  long  as  the  legitimate  expenses  of  the  Government  require  the  col 
lection  of  any  sum  from  internal  taxes. 

Mr.  Cox.     I  object  to  that  pig-iron  resolution. 

The  Speaker.  The  question  is  upon  suspending  the  rules  and  passing  the 
resolution. 

Mr.  Kelley.     And  on  that  question  I  call  for  the  yeas  and  nays. 

The  yeas  and  nays  were  ordered. 

The  question  was  than  taken  ;  and  there  were — yeas  130,  nays  21,  not  voting-76 
—  The  Globe,  April  llth,  1871. 


452  REVENUE    REFORM. 

bably  will  this  year,  one-third  of  which  at  least  is  abso 
lutely  required  to  meet  the  expenditures  of  the  Govern 
ment  ;  you  cannot  strike  that  system  down,  I  say,  all  at 
once.  And  therefore  I  indicated  in  my  resolution  the 
subjects  of  taxation  which  I  would  retain  to  the  last.* 

Mr.  Finkelnburg.  Will  the  gentleman  yield  to  me  for 
a  question  ? 

Mr.  Kdley.     Certainly. 

Mr.  Finkelnburg.  I  desire  to  ask  the  gentleman  from 
Pennsylvania  a  question  for  the  purpose  of  understanding 
the  position  he  occupies  on  the  question  of  taxation. 
Would  he  take  off  the  internal  taxes  upon  such  articles 
as  tobacco  and  whisky  before  commencing  to  reduce  the 
customs  duties  upon  such  articles  of  necessity  as  coal,  salt, 
and  woolen  goods  and  other  articles? 

Mr.  Cox.  That  is  the  question  I  wanted  to  get  at.  Will 
the  gentleman  answer  that  ? 

Mr.  Kdley.  I  will  answer  that  question  fairly  and 
very  fully  if  not  cut  short  by  the  gentleman  from 
New  York,  in  whose  time  I  am  speaking.  I  would  not 
repeal  those  taxes  before  commencing  to  revise  many  of 
the  provisions  of  the  tariff.  On  salt  I  have  already  de 
clared  myself  as  believing  that  a  reduction  of  fifty  per 
cent,  of  the  duty  would  be  judicious.  On  the  question  of 
coal  I  am  thoroughly  satisfied  that  the  existence  of  that 
duty  does  not  add  one  farthing  to  the  cost  of  a  ton  of  coal 
to  any  American  consumer.  It  brings  to  the  Treasury 
nearly  half  a  million  of  dollars  per  annum,  and  if  we 
were  to  repeal  it,  that  half  million  dollars  would  go  to 
provincial  and  English  coal  producers  to  the  detriment 
of  the  American  tax-payers.  I  am  satisfied  of  that,  sir, 
from  a  careful  examination  and  analysis  of  the  prices  of 


*  The  effect  the  internal  tax  on  spirits  or  tax  on  whisky,  as  Mr.  Cox  phrases 
it,  has  on  the  grain-growing  interest  has  been  shown  elsewhere,  and  the  follow 
ing  paragraph  from  the  Pittsburgh  Commercial  shows  how  prejudicially  it  has 
operated  on  the  shipping  interest  of  the  country  and  the  foreign  trade  of  Mr. 
Cox's  district: 

"  The  merchants  of  New  York  formerly  conducted  a  thriving  business  in  the 
exportation  of  alcohol.  Large  quantities  were  carried  to  Mediterranean  ports 
in  American  ships,  and  fruit  was  brought  in  return  from  Smyrna  and  other 
places.  Now  these  vessels,  it  is  asserted,  are  idle,  or  have  been  transferred  to 
other  or  less  lucrative  branches  of  trade.  Vessels  trading  to  ports  along  the 
Mediterranean,  it  is  asserted,  will  not  take  freights  to  the  United  States,  because 
they  are  not  sure  of  back  cargoes.  Consequently  fruits  go  to  Liverpool,  and 
are  transhipped  at  that  port  in  British  craft  sailing  for  New  York.  The  regular 
trade  in  alcohol,  from  New  York,  it  is  asserted,  should  amount  to  ten  millions 
of  dollars  a  year." 


REVENUE   REFORM.  '453 

coal  in  the  city  of  Boston  for  years  before  the  reciprocity 
treaty,  for  the  ten  years  or  more  that  the  reciprocity 
treaty  existed,  and  for  the  years  that  have  succeeded  the 
repeal  of  the  treaty.  Such  an  examination  of  facts  taken 
from  the  Boston  Shipping  List  will  settle  in  the  mind  of 
any  candid  man  the  fact  that  to  repeal  this  duty  is  to 
take  from  our  Treasury  half  a  million  dollars  in  gold 
per  annum,  and  bestow  it  upon  the  people  of  Nova 
Scotia  as  a  bribe  to  them  to  remain  English  subjects  and 
free  from  our  system  of  internal  taxes.  That  is  the  whole 
of  the  coal  question. 

Mr.  Cox.     I  must  resume  the  floor. 

Mr.  Kelley.  I  thank  the  gentleman  for  his  indulgence. 
I  would  be  glad  to  go  on  for  an  hour  answering  any 
questions  that  revenue  reformers  or  free-traders  might 
put  to  me.  While  grieving  that  I  cannot  be  further  cate 
chised,  I  again  thank  the  gentleman  from  New  York  for 
his  courtesy. 


THE   NEW   NOKTHWEST. 

AN  ADDKESS  ON  THE  NORTH  PACIFIC  KAILWAY,  IN  ITS 
RELATIONS  TO  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  THE  NORTHWEST 
ERN  SECTION  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES,  AND  TO  THE 
INDUSTRIAL  AND  COMMERCIAL  INTERESTS  OF  THE  NA 
TION.  DELIVERED  IN  THE  ACADEMY  OF  Music,  PHILA 
DELPHIA,  JUNE,  12TH,  1871.  BEPORTED  BY  D.  WOLFE 
BROWN,  PHONOGRAPHER. 

Hon.  William.  D.  Kelley,  who  was  received  with  hearty  and  long- 
continued  applause,  said : 

I  thank  you,  ladies  and  gentlemen,  for  this  very  cordial 
reception,  and  beg  leave  to  express  my  gratitude  to  the 
gentlemen  who,  by  their  invitation,  have  afforded  me  an 
opportunity  to  contribute,  however  humbly,  towards  the 
completion  of  a  work  which,  for  more  than  a  quarter  of  a 
century,  I  have  regarded  as  of  prime  importance  to  the 
country,  and  of  special  value  to  my  native  city  and  State, 
and  for  the  promotion  of  which,  during  that  period,  I  have 
labored  as  opportunity  offered.  I  do  not  expect  the  state 
ment  of  facts  I  shall  make  to  be  accepted  without  many 
grains  of  allowance  by  those  of  my  hearers  who  have  not 
visited  the  trans-Missouri  portion  of  our  country ;  and  shall 
not  be  surprised  if  many  of  you  leave  the  hall  with  the  opin 
ion  that  I  have  dealt  largely  in  exaggeration.  Yet  it  is  my 
purpose  to  speak  within  the  limits  of  truth,  and  to  make  no 
statement  that  is  not  justified  by  my  personal  observation, 
authorities  that  all  are  bound  to  recognize,  or  the  concur 
rent  statements  of  numbers  of  inhabitants  of,  and  travellers 
through,  the  country  of  which  I  am  to  speak. 

The  truth  is,  that  however  well-informed  a  man  may  be 
and  however  large  the  grasp  of  his  mind,  if  his  life  has 
been  passed  between  the  Atlantic  and  the  Mississippi  river, 
he  cannot  fully  conceive  the  strange  contrasts  between  the 
characteristics  of  the  Atlantic  and  Pacific  portions  of  our 
454 


THE   NEW  NORTHWEST.  455 

country.  The  difference  in  topography  is  marked,  and  re 
cognized  by  all ;  but  as  to  the  subtle  differences  of  climate, 
soil,  temperature  and  atmosphere,  experience,  alone,  can  im 
part  conviction. 

About  two  years  ago,  it  was  my  privilege,  in  connec 
tion  with  my  colleagues  on  the  Committee  of  Ways  and 
Means  of  the  National  House  of  Eepresentatives,  to  traverse 
the  entire  route  of  the  Union  and  Central  Pacific  Road  by 
daylight,  and  to  visit  Salt  Lake  City,  which  was,  as  all 
know,  located  in  the  heart  of  the  "  Great  Desert,"  that  it 
might  be  the  centre  of  a  Mormon  empire  that  would  be 
guarded  by  the  forces  of  Nature  against  Gentile  intrusion. 
After  having  somewhat  studied  California,  with  San  Fran 
cisco  as  our  head-quarters,  we  passed  up  the  coast  to  the 
mouth  of  the  Columbia  river,  along  that  beautiful  stream 
to  its  confluence  with  the  Willamette,  and  up  the  Willam 
ette  to  Portland,  Oregon,  as  a  new  point  of  departure  for 
observation,  visiting  thence  on  one  line  of  steamers,  Oregon 
city,  with  its  immense  flouring  and  woolen  mills,  and  on 
another,  the  grandeur  (for  beauty  does  not  express  it)  of 
the  Columbia  river  beyond  the  Cascades  and  onward  to 
the  Dalles.  Though  that  region  had  so  long  been  a  matter 
of  interest  to  me,  the  study  of  which  had  afforded  so  much 
pleasure,  each  day  revealed  new  and  strange  conditions, 
and  imbued  me  with  a  fresh  sense,  not  only  of  the  extent  of 
our  country,  but  of  the  grandeur  and  infinite  variety  of 
its  resources  and  the  beneficence  and  power  of  the  Almigh 
ty,  in  adapting  all  parts  of  it  to  the  sustenance  and  comfort 
of  man.  But  of  this  hereafter. 

Let  me  first  invite  your  attention  to  facts  within  the 
memory  of  some  of  my  auditors,  which  show  that  the  re 
sources  of  the  new  northwest  and  its  adaptability  to  rail 
road  purposes  are  not,  as  is  sometimes  intimated,  of  recent 
discovery,  but  have  long  been  known,  and  that  the  route  of 
the  Northern  Pacific  Railroad  is  that  which  was  originally 
proposed,  because  it  is  the  shortest  and  best  by  which  to 
connect  the  seaboard  at  Baltimore,  Philadelphia,  New 
York,  Boston,  and  Portland,  Me.,  with  the  waters  of  Puget 
Sound  and  the  commerce  of  the  ancient  East,  which  is  now 
the  West,  the  march  towards  which,  of  American  ideas  is 
illustrating  again  the  truth  that, 

"Westward  the  course  of  empire  takes  its  way." 


4:56  THE  NEW  NORTHWEST. 

PACIFIC  EAILROAD  HISTORY. 

During  the  summer  of  1845,  twenty  six  years  ago,  Asa 
Whitney,  of  New  York,  who  had  spent  many  years  in 
China,  and  sought  by  all  such  agencies  as  were  at  the 
Command  of  private  enterprise,  information  about  the  coun- 
ry  lying  between  Lake  Michigan  and  Puget  Sound,  did 
me  the  honor  to  seek  my  acquaintance  and  bring  to  my  at 
tention  the  subject  of  a  railroad  from  the  base  of  the  lake  to 
some  point  in  Oregon,  on  the  waters  of  Puget  Sound  or  the 
Columbia  Kiver,  or  to  a  point  on  each.  The  whole  sub 
ject  was  new  to  me;  but  Mr.  Whitney  came  prepared  to 
enlighten  those  who  were  ignorant,  and  to  inspire  with  faith 
those  who  doubted.  His  general  views  were  in  print,  and 
embodied  columns  of  statistics,  obtained  from  official  sources, 
and  many  facts  reported  by  persons  who  had  traveled  more 
or  less  through  the  region  which  the  proposed  road  was  to 
traverse.  The  magnitude  of  the  subject  inspired  me,  and  my 
enthusiasm  for  his  great  project  induced  Mr.  Whitney,  des 
pite  the  disparity  in  our  years,  to  favor  me  with  frequent  con 
ferences,  and  to  bring  to  my  attention  whatever  information 
relating  to  the  subject  he  obtained.  Early  in  the  year  1846, 
I  felt  justified,  by  the  growth  of  sentiment  in  its  favor,  in 
undertaking  to  secure  him  an  opportunity  to  present  his 
project  to  a  public  meeting  of  the  citizens  of  Philadelphia. 
To  induce  a  sufficient  number  of  gentlemen  to  act  as  officers 
of  the  meeting  was  the  work  of  time.  I  found  few  who 
took  an  interest  in,  or  believed  in  the  feasibility  of.  the 
project.  Some  said  that  a  railroad  so  far  north  would  not 
be  available  for  as  many  months  in  the  year  as  the  Penn 
sylvania  canals  were;  that  it  would  be  buried  in  snow 
more  than  half  the  year.  Others  cried,  *'  What  madness 
to  talk  of  a  railroad  more  than  two  thousand  miles  long 
through  that  wilderness,  when  it  is  impossible  to  build  one 
»ver  the  Alleghanies !  "  (Laughter  and  applause.) 

As  I  went  from  man  to  man  with  Mr.  Whitney's  invalu 
able  collection  of  facts  and  figures,  I  discovered  that  the 
doubts  with  which  the  work  must  contend  were  infinite  in 
number,  and  it  was  not  until  six  months  had  elapsed  that 
a  sufficient  number  of  well-known  citizens  to  constitute  the 
officers  of  a  meeting  had  consented  to  sign  the  call  for  one 
and  act  as  such.  But  patience  and  perseverance  accom 
plish  a  good  deal  in  this  world.  The  cause  had  gained 
adherents,  and,  as  I  find  by  reference  to  the  papers  of  that 


THE   NEW   NORTHWEST.  457 

day,  the  meeting  for  which  I  had  so  long  labored  was  held 
in  the  Chinese  Museum,  on  the  evening  of  December  23d, 
1846.  Some  of  these  my  venerable  friends  who  sit  around 
me  probably  remember  the  occasion,  as  I  see  among  them 
some  who  acted  as  officers.  His  honor,  John  Swift,  then 
Mayor  of  the  city,  presided.  Col.  James  Page,  Hons. 
Eichard  Yaux,  William  M.  Meredith  and  John  F.  Belster- 
ling,  with  Mr.  David  S.  Brown  and  Mr.  Charles  B.  Trego 
(all  of  whom  still  survive)  were  among  the  vice-presidents  ; 
and  Senator  Wm.  A.  Crabb,  since  deceased,  and  William 
D.  Kelley  served  as  secretaries.  The  speakers  were  Messrs. 
Whitney,  Josiah  Eandall,  Peter  A.  Browne  and  William 
D.  Kelley. 

Mayor  Swift,  with  a  few  cautious  words  commendatory 
of  his  great  enterprise,  introduced  Mr.  Whitney,  who 
stated,  with  great  clearness,  his  project,  and  the  advantages 
that  would  result  from  its  execution.  It  was,  he  said,  to 
be  a  railroad  from  the  base  of  Lake  Michigan  to  a  point  on 
navigable  water  in  Oregon.  He  believed  that  it  could  be 
constructed  on  a  line  about  2400  miles  in  length  ;  and  he 
and  his  associates  hoped  to  be  able  to  build  it  in  twenty 
years,  if  the  Government  would  grant  sixty  miles'  breadth 
of  land  for  the  whole  distance.  When  asked  how  he- would 
make  land  in  that  remote  northern  wilderness  available  for 
the  building  of  a  road,  he  described  the  character  of  the 
climate,  and  showed  that  north  of  the  forty-ninth  degree 
of  north  latitude,  and  in  valleys  extending  up  to  the  fifty- 
sixth  degree,  the  climate  was  in  summer  as  genial  as  that 
of  southern  Pennsylvania;  and  asserted  emphatically  that 
a  railroad  through  that  section  would  be  less  obstructed  by 
snow  than  one  through  Central  New  York  or  Pennsylvania. 

His  scheme  was  to  organize  a  vast  system  of  immigra 
tion  from  the  cities  of  the  Eastern  States  and  from  Europe  ; 
the  workmen  were  to  be  paid  in  part  in  land,  and  a  corps 
was  to  be  detailed  to  prepare  a  part  of  each  farm  for  culti 
vation  the  next  year,  so  that  when  the  laborers  of  the 
second  year  should  go  forward  they  would  leave  behind 
them  those  of  the  first  as  farmers  and  guardsmen  of  the 
road  ;  by  this  process  many  millions  of  poor  and  oppressed 
people  would  be  lifted  to  the  dignity  of  free-holding 
American  citizens,  and  the  great  route  for  the  commerce 
of  the  world  would  be  established  amid  the  development 
of  the  boundless  resources  of  the  yet  new  Northwest.  (Ap 
plause.) 


458  THE    NEW 

At  the  close  of  an  eloquent  address,  the  late  Josiah  Kan- 
dall,  Esq.,  submitted  a  series  of  resolutions,  from  which  I 
quote  the  following,  which  were  heartily  adopted : 

"  Whereas,  the  completion  of  a  railroad  from  Lake  Michigan  to 
the  Pacific  would  secure  the  carrying  of  the  greater  portion  of  the 
commerce  of  the  world  to  American  enterprise,  and  open  to  it  the 
markets  of  Japan  and  the  vast  empire  of  China,  of  all  India,  and  of 
all  the  islands  of  the  Pacific  and  Indian  Oceans,  together  with  those 
of  the  Western  Coast  of  Mexico  and  South  America; 

And,  whereas,  we  have  in  our  public  lands  a  fund  sufficient  for 
and  appropriate  to  the  construction  of  so  great  and  beneficent  a 
work ;  and  the  proposition  of  Asa  Whitney,  Esq.,  of  New  York,  to 
construct  a  railroad  from  Lake  Michigan  to  the  Pacific  for  the  grant 
of  a  strip  of  land  60  miles  wide,  offers  a  feasible  and  cheap,  if  not  the 
only  plan  for  the  early  completion  of  an  avenue  from  ocean  to  ocean ; 
therefore, 

"  Resolved,  That  we  cordially  approve  of  the  project  of  Asa  Whit 
ney,  Esq.,  for  the  construction  of  a  railroad  to  the  Pacific,  and  res 
pectfully  petition  Congress  to  grant  or  set  apart,  before  the  close  of 
the  present  session,  the  lands  prayed  for  by  Mr.  Whitney  for  this 
purpose." 

It  was  also  resolved  to  send  copies  of  the  resolutions  and 
proceedings  of  the  meeting  to  our  senators  and  members  of 
Congress,  and  to  the  Governor  of  the  Commonwealth,  with 
the  request  that  he  would  bring  the  subject  to  the  attention 
of  the  Legislature. 

Encouraged  by  this  success,  Mr.  Whitney  visited  other 
cities,  and  brought  his  plans  before  the  people.  On  the 
4th  of  January,  1847,  he  addressed  an  immense  meeting  in 
the  Tabernacle,  New  York,  which  was  presided  over  by 
the  mayor  and  participated  in  by  the  leading  men  of  that 
city.  His  remarks  were  listened  to,  but  at  their  close  a 
mob  took  possession  of  the  hall  and  denounced  the  project 
as  a  swindle,  declaring  that  it  was  an  attempt  on  the  part 
of  a  band  of  conspirators  to  defraud  the  people  by  inducing 
the  Government  to  make  an  immense  grant  of  land  for  an 
impracticable  project. 

This  was  the  initial  movement  of  a  powerful  and  or 
ganized  opposition,  before  which  Mr.  Whitney  retired, 
silenced  in  his  effort  to  promote  one  of  the  grandest  works 
ever  conceived  by  an  American  citizen.  (Applause.)  But 
his  labors  had  not  been  in  vain.  On  the  23d  of  June, 
1848,  Hon.  James  Pollock,  the  present  Director  of  the 
United  States  Mint,  who  does  me  the  honor  to  listen  to 
me,  and  who  was  then  in  Congress  from  this  State,  as  chair 
man  of  a  special  committee  appointed  in  accordance  with 


THE   NEW   NORTHWEST.  459 

a  resolution  he  had  offered,  presented  a  favorable  report 
on  the  project  of  a  Pacific  Eailroad,  recommending  that 
steps  be  taken  to  secure  adequate  explorations  and  surveys 
of  the  trans-Mississippi  country.  The  "madness"  of  the 
project 'was  still  laughed  at  by  "grave  and  reverend" 
senators;  and  it  was  not  until  the  3d  of  March,  1853,  that 
the  President  signed  an  act  authorizing  the  Secretary  of 
War,  under  his  direction,  "  to  employ  such  portion  of  the 
corps  of  topographical  engineers  and  such  other  persons  as 
he  may  deem  necessary  to  make  such  explorations  and  sur 
veys  as  he  may  deem  advisable,  to  ascertain  the  most  prac 
ticable  and  economical  route  for  a  railroad  from  the  Missis 
sippi  river  to  the  Pacific  ocean."  Effect  was  given  to  this 
resolution  at  the  earliest  day,  but  it  was  not  until  the  27th 
of  February,  1855,  that  the  Secretary  of  War  was  able  to 
submit  to  the  President,  for  communication  to  Congress, 
the  reports  of  the  several  surveying  parties.  The  first  of 
these  reports  were  given  to  the  public  by  order  of  Con 
gress  in  the  latter  part  of  that  year.  They  fill  thirteen 
large  quarto  volumes,  and  I  shall  have  occasion  to  refer 
to  them  hereafter. 

THE  PENNSYLVANIA  CENTRAL  ROAD 

As  experience  is  a  trusted  teacher  it  may  be  well  to 
pause  and  examine  the  condition  of  the  railroad  interests  of 
the  country  at  that  time.  At  the  close  of  1846,  we  had  4930 
miles  of  road  in  operation,  297  of  which  had  been  completed 
during  that  year.  A  system  of  continuous  railroad  had 
not  been  proposed.  Until  about  that  time  the  function  ol 
railroads  had  been  assumed  to  be  to  connect  water-courses 
Thus  the  Columbia  Railroad,  constructed  by  our  State 
authorities,  connected  the  waters  of  the  Pennsylvania  canals 
with  those  of  the  Delaware  river ;  the  Camden  and  Amboy 
road  connected  the  waters  of  the  Delaware  with  those  of 
the  Raritan ;  from  Philadelphia  to  Baltimore,  until  1838, 
communication  was  by  steamboat  from  Philadelphia  to 
Newcastle,  thence  by  rail  to  Frenchtown,  thence  by  steam 
boat  to  Baltimore.  The  route  from  Boston  to  New  York 
was  by  railroad  from  Boston  to  Providence,  and  by  steam 
boat  thence  to  New  York.  These  connecting  links  of 
road  soon  developed  a  commerce,  not  equal  to  their  ca 
pacity  but  beyond  that  of  available  water  conveyance,  and 
thus  demonstrated  the  necessity  of  a  more  general  resort 


460  THE   NEW  NORTHWEST. 

to  roads.  Hence  the  subject  of  the  expansion  of  OUT  sys 
tem  was  attracting  attention.  The  construction  of  the 
Pennsylvania  Central  road  was  under  consideration.  On 
the  3d  of  April,  1846,  the  Legislature,  after  much  and  vio 
lent  controversy,  had  consented  to  give  the  madcaps,  who 
were  willing  to  engage  in  such  a  project,  a  charter ;  but  to 
prevent  them  from  practising  fraud,  by  peddling  the  fran 
chise  or  holding  it  for  sinister  purposes,  the  act  required 
that  $2,500,000  of  stock  should  be  subscribed,  and  that  the 
enormous  sum  of  $250,000  should  be  paid  in  before  the 
issuing  of  letters  patent.  Most  of  you,  doubtless,  suppose 
that  the  requisite  subscription  was  obtained  at  once.  JSTo  ; 
nearly  twelve  months  were  required  to  induce  the  enter 
prising  men  of  Philadelphia  to  risk  two  millions  and  a  half 
of  dollars  in  building  a  road  over  the  Alleghanies.  "  The 
grades  on  the  road,"  it  was  said,  "would  be  impracticable; 
the  heavy  snows  and  long  winter  would  render  the  road 
unavailable  ;  the  project  was  a  mad  one."  Those  only  who 
remember  the  efforts  required  to  induce  the  people  of  Penn 
sylvania  to  make  that  small  subscription  would  believe 
the  story,  could  it  be  faithfully  told.  The  active  young 
men  of  this  day  would  regard  it  as  a  pungent  satire. 

Town  meetings  were  held,  and  "  block-committees " 
were  appointed,  by  whom  citizens  were  solicited  to  sub 
scribe  for  five  shares  or  three  or  one,  for  the  sake  of  the 
experiment,  even  though  the  investment  might  be  unpro 
ductive.  Meetings  of  draymen  and  porters  were  held,  and 
they  were  shown  that  if  each  would  take  a  share,  it  would 
help  the  enterprise ;  that  if  the  road  should  prove  a  suc 
cess  they  would  get  good  interest  on  their  money  with 
great  increase  of  business ;  and  if  not,  it  would  have  been 
wisely  spent  in  promoting  an  enterprise  which,  in  the 
judgment  of  many  good  men,  promised  great  benefit  to 
the  City  and  State. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  business  men  of  Philadelphia,  but 
the  appeal  was  not  to  them  alone ;  it  was  to  the  people  of 
Pennsylvania.  This  was  to  be  a  Pennsylvania  road,  and 
by  the  act  of  incorporation  the  commissioners  for  receiving 
subscriptions  were  required  to  open  books  at  Pittsburg, 
Hollidaysburg,  Harrisburg,  and  all  the  chief  towns  along 
the  line  of  the  road,  as  well  as  in  Philadelphia ;  and  the 
energy,  enterprise,  and  capital  of  the  whole  State  stood  ap- 
paled  at  the  magnitude  and  doubtful  character  of  an  under 


THE   NEW   NORTHWEST.  461 

taking  to  build  a  continuous  line  of  railroad  from  Phila 
delphia  to  Pittsburg. 

It  was  not  until  the  30th  of  March,  1847,  but  three  days 
less  than  one  year  from  the  granting  of  the  charter,  that  the 
petty  subscription  required  was  obtained,  letters  patent  is 
sued,  and  a  board  of  directors  organized.  And  it  remained 
for  some  time  thereafter  a  grave  question  whether  capital 
could  be  obtained  by  subscription  or  loan  to  complete  the 
road. 

But  by  the  middle  of  October,  1850,  a  single  track  was 
completed  from  Harrisburg,  its  then  point  of  departure, 
to  Altoona,  at  the  foot  of  the  Alleghany  mountains, 
The  triumph  was  immense ;  and  on  the  18th  of  October, 
1850,  the  event  was  celebrated  by  an  excursion,  which  was 
enjoyed  by  many  prominent  business  men  and  other  friends 
of  the  road.  In  the  evening  a  meeting  was  held  over  a 
pleasant  dinner,  at  which  I  remember  my  friend,  General 
Patterson  (pointing  to  the  General,  who  sat  on  the  stage  in 
company  with  Governor  Geary),  and  his  friend,  old  General 
Kiley,  were  speakers.  The  late  President  Buchanan  and 
Joseph  R.  Ingersoll,  Esq.,  also  deceased,  spoke.  At  the 
close  of  a  very  brilliant  speech,  my  friend,  Morton  Mc- 
Michael,  Esq.,  did  me  the  honor  to  introduce  me  as  one 
who  had  been  an  early  and  efficient  friend  of  the  road. 

From  a  musty  copy  of  the  North  American  now  before 
me,  I  find  that,  among  other  things,  I  expressed  my  pride 
"  in  the  fact  that  I  was  a  Philadelphian,  a  member  of  that 
community  which,  with  aid  from  but  a  single  township — 
that  of  Allegheny — had,  in  the  face  of  a  host  of  discourage 
ments,  embarked  their  capital,  enterprise,  energy  and  skill 
in  the  construction  of  the  magnificent  road  over  which  we 
had  travelled  that  day,  and  which,  though  not  yet  com 
pleted,  was  sufficiently  advanced  to  earn  in  a  few  years  the 
means  for  its  completion,  should  they  not  be  supplied  from 
other  sources."  And,  alluding  to  what  was  then  my  fa 
vorite  project,  I  said : 

"  The  English  mail  for  Calcutta  will  yet  travel  over  our  Pennsyl 
vania  Railroad,  and  its  iron  ribs  will  groan  under  the  weight  of  com 
modities  passing  to  and  fro  between  the  250,000,000  of  people  east 
of  the  Atlantic  and  the  750,000,000  west  of  the  Pacific.  The  dis 
covery  of  our  Continent  by  Columbus  was  accidental;  but  the 
builders  of  this  road  and  its  several  continuations  through  the 
Western  States  are  vindicating  his  sagacity.  He  sailed  due  west 
from  Europe  to  find  a  shorter  route  to  the  wealth  of  India.  He  was 


462  THE  NEW  NORTHWEST. 

right ;  the  fact  that  he  encountered  a  continent  did  not  increase  the 
distance  between  the  points  ;  it  did  but  demonstrate  the  necessity 
for  a  new  mode  of  conveyance.  This  the  railroad  and  locomotive 
supply.  The  passage  of  the  two  oceans  by  steam  and  the  crossing 
of  our  country  on  a  railroad  will  reduce  the  time  requisite  for  a  voy 
age  from  London  to  Canton  to  less  than  thirty  days. 

"Columbus  was  no  enthusiast.  He  looked  calmly  and  gravely  at 
facts,  and  spoke  the  words  of  sober  wisdom;  and  so,  let  folly  sneer 
as  it  may,  do  those  who  speak  of  the  Pennsylvania  road  as  a  link  in 
a  chain  of  commercial  facilities  which  is  to  girdle  the  earth."  (Ap 
plause.) 

And  again  : 

"The  Mississippi  Yalley  is  not  our  Western  country,  nor  is  the 
Pacific  coast  of  our  country  the  '  far  West '  we  look  to.  Columbus 
would  go  west  to  the  Indies ;  and  we  will  do  it.  The  riches  of  our 
West,  now  the  world's  East,  will  lade  our  road,  stimulate  our  agri 
culture,  develop  our  vast  mineral  resources,  quicken  arid  expand 
our  enterprise,  and  drop  their  fatness  throughout  our  borders."  * 
(Applause.)  f 

I  find  that,  when  somewhat  laughed  at  for  this  outburst 
of  subdued  enthusiasm,  I  replied  by  saying: 

"Why,  you  can  find  in  Philadelphia  to-day  more  men  clamorous 
for  a  road  from  St.  Louis  to  San  Francisco  than  you  could  who  be 
lieved  in  the  possibility  of  constructing  a  continuous  road  over  the 
mountains  hence  to  Pittsburg  six  years  ago." 

This,  you  will  remember,  was  after  the  acquisition  of 
California  and  the  discovery  of  her  gold-fields. 

A   QUARTER   OF   A   CENTURY. 

But  to  return  to  1846,  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago.  Let 
no  man  think  that  the  Pacific  Kailroad  then  projected  was 
to  run  to  San  Francisco,  or  elsewhere  than  to  the  heart  of 
the  unorganized  Territory  of  Oregon,  which  extended  from 
the  42d  to  the  49th  parallel  of  laditude,  and  embraced  what 
is  now  the  State  of  Oregon  and  Washington  Territory,  into 
which  no  settlers  had  yet  gone. 

There  was  then  no  San  Francisco.  Not  a  cabin  or  a  hut 
stood  within  the  now  corporate  limits  of  that  beautiful  and 

*  On  the  16th  of  August,  1871,  I  was  a  passenger  on  the  Union  Pacific  Rail 
road.  While  breakfasting  at  Grand  Island,  Nebraska,  I  was  shown  by  C.  P. 
Huntington,  Esq.,  Vice  President  of  the  Central  Pacific  Co.,  a  telegram  inform 
ing  him  that  his  company  had  on  the  15th  contracted  for  the  carriage  from  San  » 
Francisco  of  930  tons — 93  car  loads — of  tea,  much  of  which  was  to  go  to  New 
York,  via  the  Pennsylvania  Central  Road.  The  largest  preceding  engagement 
had  been  for  570  tons. 


THE  NEW  NORTHWEST.  463 

prosperous  city.  California,  Nevada,  Arizona  and  New 
Mexico,  were  still  Mexican  territory.  Neither  science  nor 
observation  had  detected  the  deposits  of  gold  and  silver, 
or  the  agricultural  capabilities  of  that  vast  region  of  coun 
try.  The  great  railroad  centre  of  the  West,  Chicago,  had 
not  yet  come  into  public  view.  The  less  than  10,000  peo 
ple  who  had  gathered  at  the  confluence  of  the  Chicago 
river  with  Lake  Michigan  had  no  presentiment  that  the 
swamp  in  which  they  dwelt  would,  in  less  than  twenty 
years,  be  filled  up  and  raised  nearly  twenty  feet,  to  provide 
drainage  for  the  streets  of  the  most  enterprising  and  re 
markable  city  of  its  age  in  the  world.  Michigan  then  had 
a  population  of  less  than  250,000,  and  Wisconsin  and  Iowa 
each  but  100,000 ;  and  civilization  had  not  yet  penetrated 
the  wild  region  then  known  as  Minnesota  Territory,  where 
the  census  takers,  four  years  later,  found  but  6038  people. 
Four  years  later  there  were  but  91,635  people  in  California, 
which  had  then  been  ceded  to  us  by  Mexico,  and  admitted  to 
the  Union  as  a  State,  and  whose  recently  discovered  deposits 
of  gold  had  attracted  immigrants  from  every  clime.  There 
was  no  Government  in  Kansas  and  Nebraska,  that  whole 
fertile  region  being  in  possession  of  the  Indian  and  the  buf 
falo.  The  name  of  that  busy  centre  of  river  and  railroad 
commerce,  Omaha,  had  not  been  heard  by  English-speak 
ing  people,  and  the  vast  mineral,  grazing  and  agricul 
tural  region  through  which  the  Union  and  Central  Pa 
cific  railroad  is  now  doing  a  profitable  and  rapidly  in 
creasing  business,  was  noted  by  geographers  as  the 
"  Great  American  Desert."  Philadelphia  had  no  railroad 
connection  with  Pittsburg,  Pittsburg  none  with  Cincin 
nati  or  Chicago,  nor  any  of  these  with  St.  Louis.  The 
northwestern  part  of  our  State  was  known  as  the  "  wild-cat 
country,"  in  which  it  was  regarded  as  a  misfortune  to  own 
land  unless  it  was  timbered  and  on  the  banks  of  a  moun 
tain  stream  ;  and  properties  in  that  wide  section  in  which 
coal  and  petroleum  have  since  been  discovered  were  sold 
every  few  years  for  taxes,  because  people  could  not  afford 
to  own  land  in  such  a  cold,  mountainous,  unproductive  and 
inaccessible  country.  (Laughter  and  applause.) 

Surely  the  world  moves  and  time  does  work  wonders. 
What  railroads  we  have  you  know ;  what  railroads  we  are 
to  have  you  only  begin  to  suspect.  In  Europe,  during 
this  quarter  of  a  century,  dynasties  and  the  boundaries  of 


464  THE  NEW   NORTHWEST. 

empires  have  changed,  but  the  increase  of  population  has 
been  scarcely  perceptible.  The  oppressions  of  the  feudal 
past  linger  there,  and  cannot  be  shaken  off.  But  here, 
where  man  is  free,  and  nature  offers  boundless  returns  to 
enterprise,  broad  empires  have  risen,  embracing  towns,  cities, 
and  states;  and  millions  of  people  born  in  many  lands 
with  poverty  and  oppression  as  their  only  birthright,  are 
now,  as  American  citizens,  enjoying  all  the  comforts  and 
refinements  of  civilization,  and  with  capital  rivaling  that 
of  European  princes,  originating  and  pressing  forward 
great  enterprises  which  are  in  the  next  quarter  of  a  cen 
tury  to  work  more  marvellous  changes  than  any  I  have 
alluded  to.  Yes,  ladies  and  gentlemen,  were  supernal 
power  to  unfold  to  our  view  our  country  as  it  shall  be  a 
quarter  of  a  century  hence,  the  most  far-seeing  and  san 
guine  of  us  would  regard  the  reality  as  a  magnificent  de 
lusion.  Our  extension  of  territory  and  law,  great  as  it  has 
been,  is  of  small  consequence  in  comparison  with  the 
achievements  of  mind  in  the  empire  of  science  and  art, 
whereby  man  is  enabled  to  produce  ten-fold,  and  in  many 
departments  of  productive  industry  a  hundred-fold  as  much 
as  he  could  twenty-five  years  ago  by  the  same  amount  of 
labor.  New  roads  are  to  be  built ;  new  towns,  cities  and 
states  to  be  created ;  new  resources  developed ;  and  the 
sluggish  people  of  the  Orient  are  to  be  awakened  to  their 
own  interests  and  induced  to  contribute  their  vast  share  to 
the  progress  and  commerce  of  the  world.  The  vision  that 
filled  the  soul  of  Columbus  was  a  grand  one ;  but  that 
which  opens  to  our  view,  and  should  possess  and  animate 
us,  is  as  much  grander  and  more  beneficent  as  the  civiliza 
tion  and  arts  of  the  close  of  the  19th  are  superior  to  those 
of  the  dawning  days  of  the  14th  century. 

THE   NORTHERN    PACIFIC   RAILROAD. 

I  regard  the  construction  of  the  Northern  Pacific  Rail 
road  as  chief  among  the  great  works  of  the  future,  and  be 
lieve  that  while  it  will  be  a  magnificent  monument  to  its 
builders  and  promoters,  and  abundantly  reward  their  en 
terprise  and  labor,  its  construction  will  add  inconceivably 
to  the  wealth,  power  and  influence  of  the  nation.  It  will 
open  to  settlement,  under  the  homestead  and  pre-emption 
laws,  a  territory  that  would  accommodate  all  the  peasantry 
of  Europe,  and,  by  the  development  of  its  boundless  and 


THE   NEW   NORTHWEST.  465 

varied  mineral  and  agricultural  resources,  lift  millions  of 
men  from  poverty  to  wealth,  and  enable  many  who  are 
burdens  upon  society  to  bless  it  by  their  prosperity.  (Ap 
plause.) 

These  are  well  considered  convictions.  If  I  am  mis 
taken,  I  have,  as  I  have  shown  you,  cherished  the  delusion 
through  the  greater  part  of  my  manhood ;  and  the  study 
of  many  authorities,  much  intercourse  with  men,  and  ex 
tended  travel  have  only  served  to  confirm  it.  Nor  do  I 
now  express  them  for  the  first  time.  On  the  26th  of  April, 
1866,  a  bill  proposing  to  authorize  the  Government  to  aid 
in  the  construction  of  the  Northern  Pacific  Kailroad  was 
under  consideration  by  Congress,  arid  I  participated  in 
the  discussion.  By  reference  to  the  Globe,  I  find,  that  after 
having  characterized  the  construction  of  the  road  as  a  mat 
ter  of  not  only  National  but  world-wide  importance  I  said  : 

"  From  Lake  Superior  to  Puget  Sound  !  A  railroad  stretching 
from  Lake  Superior  to  Puget  Sound,  a  distance  of  1800  miles  !  To 
open  to  civilization  an  empire  longer  and  broader  than  Western 
Europe,  from  the  southern  vinelands  of  sunny  Spain  on  the  one 
hand  to  the  Hyperborean  forests  of  Norway  on  the  other  !  Yes, 
sir  ;  an  empire  equal  in  extent  to  England,  Ireland,  Scotland,  France, 
Belgium,  the  German  States,  Austria,  Holland,  Italy,  Switzerland, 
Denmark,  Sweden,  Norway,  Spain  and  Portugal. 

"  We  fail,  Mr.  Speaker,  to  understand  our  relations  to  the  age  in 
which  we  live  and  our  duties  to  mankind,  because  we  fail  to  appre 
ciate  the  grand  dimensions  and  unimagined  resources  of  our  country. 
We  would  regard  ourselves  as  giants  did  we  estimate  ourselves  in 
proportion  to  possessions  so  grand  in  a  country  so  abounding  in 
multiform  resources,  so  undeveloped,  and  so  sparsely  settled. 

"The  region  through  which  it  is  proposed  to  construct  this  road, 
exceeding  in  extent  all  the  countries  I  have  named,  also  embodies 
more  mineral  wealth  than  they  all  combined  ever  possessed.  But 
what  is  its  condition  ?  It  is  a  wilderness.  Almost  every  acre  of  it 
is  still  innocent  of  the  tread  of  a  tax  collector.  It  yields  the  Govern 
ment  no  revenue.  Along  the  Pacific  coast  a  few  thriving  villages 
dot  it.  Some  of  them  will  be  one  day  great  cities,  but  thy  are  now 
on  the  borders  of  a  vast  wilderness." 

COMPARED  WITH  OTHER  ROUTES. 

But  there  are  those  who,  while  admitting  the  vast  extent 
and  wonderful  resources  of  the  country,  assert  that  it  is  un 
fit  for  occupancy  by  communities  by  reason  of  its  high 
latitude  and  the  altitude  of  its  mountains.  They  present 
all  the  objections  that  were  made  to  the  construction  of  the 
Pennsylvania  Railroad.  "The  mountains  are  too  high," 
30 


466  THE   NEW  NORTHWEST. 

"  the  snows  are  too  deep,  and  lie  too  long ! "  Are  not 
these  objections  as  groundless  in  this  case  as  they  were  in 
that?  Let  us  see.  Government  surveys  and  other  obser 
vations  show,  beyond  reasonable  question,  that  a  railroad 
between  the  47th  and  49th  parallels  will  have  a  better 
route  than  any  other  road  north  of  the  32d  degree,  which  line 
has  the  drawback  of  a  summer  climate  that  is  so  nearly 
tropical  as  to  interfere  with  travel  and  the  general  transit 
of  goods.  I  am  convinced  that  the  country  through  which 
the  Northern  Pacific  Railroad  is  to  pass  will,  twenty-five 
years  hence,  contain  double  the  population  that  will  then 
be  found  along  the  line  of  the  road  which  connects  Omaha 
and  Sacramento.  Indeed  I  believe  I  would  be  within  the 
bounds  of  reasonable  prediction  if  I  made  my  proposition 
embrace  the  continuation  of  the  road  from  the  city  of  Sac 
ramento  to  San  Francisco,  notwithstanding  the  wondrous 
attractions  California  presents  to  those  who  are  seeking  a 
new  home  and  a  more  profitable  field  for  enterprise. 

The  Central  route  must  create  its  way  traffic;  none 
awaited  its  construction.  From  Omaha  to  Sacramento  not 
a  navigable  stream  crosses  the  route  of  the  Union  and  Cen 
tral  road  ;  nor  does  one  approach  it.  Let  me  not  be  un 
derstood  as  disparaging  the  value  of  this  road,  or  as  inti 
mating  that  it  is  not  already  doing  a  profitable  business, 
or  that  it  will  not,  as  every  other  railroad  in  this  country  has 
done,  create  a  constantly  increasing  volume  of  business  that 
will  enable  it  to  rapidly  decrease  its  rates  for  freight  and 
travel,  while  increasing  its  income  and  net  profits.  Indeed 
it  is  already  doing  this,  and  its  present  charges  for  freight 
and  travel  compare  very  favorably  with  those  of  1869. 

Yes,  it  has  its  way  business  to  create,  and  is  doing  it 
rapidly.  Witness  the  two  branch  roads  already  con 
structed,  one  from  Denver  to  Cheyenne,  and  the  other  from 
Salt  Lake  City  to  Ogden.  Before  the  main  line  was  built, 
who  dreamed  of  railroads  along  either  of  those  valleys  ? 
Behold,  also,  the  enormous  development  of  the  coal  and 
iron  fields  at  Evanston,  500  miles  west  of  Cheyenne,  and 
more  than  1000  miles  west  of  Omaha.  Two  years  ago  the 
fact  was  proudly  announced  that  both  coal  and  iron  had 
been  discovered  at  Evanston ;  and  now  the  place  is  marked 
by  the  smoke  and  din  of  forges,  furnaces,  rolling-mills, 
machine  shops,  and  preparations  are  making  for  the  manu 
facture  of  Bessemer  steel  rails,  the  construction  of  the  works 
having  been  commenced.  (Applause.) 


THE  -NEW  NORTHWEST.  467 

Look,  too,  at  the  mavellous  development  by  "gentile" 
hands  of  the  silver  mines  in  southern  Utah,  to  which  the 
Mormons,  Brigham  Young  having  driven  the  first  spike 
about  a  fortnight  ago,  are  extending  their  branch  road  in 
order  to  carry  silver  ore,  the  transportation  of  which  from 
the  mines  to  Swansea,  England,  taxes  it  $40  a  ton.*  This 
tax  will  be  saved  when  Americans  shall  be  enterprising 
enough  to  put  up  adequate  smelting  works  in  a  country  in 
which  coal  and  rich  ores  abound.  Yes,  British  vessels 
coming  to  New  York  and  Philadelphia  with  salt  or  iron 
return  freighted  with  the  ores  of  southern  Utah,  because 
we  have  not  the  enterprise  to  smelt  them. 

Look,  again,  at  the  development  of  the  wool  trade.  In 
many  of  the  valleys  along  the  line  of  the  Central  and  Union 
road  there  are  flocks  numbering  not  thirty,  not  fifty,  not  a 
hundred  sheep,  as  in  the  old  States,  but  thousands ;  and 
some  flocks  numbering  more  than  ten  thousand  head  now 
range  valleys  in  the  very  heart  of  the  "  Great  American 
Desert,"  where  it  was  supposed  civilization  would  never 
find  an  abode. 

What  a  field  for  genius,  enterprise  and  industry!  It 
will,  at  no  distant  day,  swarm  with  men  of  grit.  There 
are  thousands  of  young  men  in  this  city  filling  small  offices, 
or  in  some  other  way  picking  up  a  precarious  living,  getting 
through  the  world  somehow,  never  knowing  whether  both 
ends  will  meet  at  the  end  of  any  month,  who,  were  they  to 
go  to  this  country,  carrying  with  them  the  knowledge 
gained  in  our  furnaces,  machine  shops  or  factories,  would 
in  a  few  years  find  themselves  at  the  head  of  large  estab 
lishments  and  commanding  hundreds  of  employees.  (Ap 
plause.)  I  rejoice  in  the  fact  that  the  Grand  Army  of  the. 
Republic  is  organizing  one-armed  and  one-legged  soldiers 
to  go  and  settle  in  colonies  upon  the  public  lands,  on  the 
theory  that  their  wives  and  children  will  share  their  labors 
in  securing  a  homestead  and  honest  independence.  The 
scheme  is  as  judicious  as  it  is  noble,  arid  the  poor  disabled 
fellows  will,  I  doubt  not,  in  a  few  years  write  back  to  their 

*  The  proprietors  of  the  Emma  Mine,  which  is  about  twenty  miles  south  of 
Salt  Lake  City,  have  a  contract  with  the  Union  Pacific  Company  to  carry  100 
tons  of  argentiferous  Galena  ore  per  day.  This  requires  ten  cars,  but  does  not 
dispose  of  all  the  ore  yielded  by  this  mine.  The  remainder  with  ore  from  other 
mines  is  reduced  to  matt  at  Stockton  and  Salt  Lake  City.  Ingots  weighing 
hundreds  of  pounds,  of  which  gold  is  the  element  of  chief  value,  silver  the  next, 
and  lead  the  least,  though  chief  in  bulk,  are  always  to  be  found  in  great  stacks 
upon  the  side-walks  of  the  business  street  of  Salt  Lake  City  awaiting  purchasers. 


468  THE    NEW   NORTHWEST. 

less  energetic  but  unmutilated  comrades  to  come  and  work 
for  and  be  fed  and  clothed  by  them.  (Laughter  and  ap 
plause.) 

These  branch  roads  and  expanding  industries  are  but 
some  of  the  many  precursors  and  sure  pledges  of  the  im 
mense  sources  of  traffic  that  are  to  rise  along  a  road,  the 
drinking  water  for  many  of  whose  agents,  as  well  as  for 
the  supply  of  many  of  its  engines,  is  brought  in  tanks 
over  alkaline  plains  for  hundreds  of  miles,  and  one  of  the 
summits  of  which,  at  Sherman,  is  a  mile  and  a-half  above 
the  topmost  spire  of  Philadelphia,  and  3285  feet  higher 
than  the  most  elevated  summit  on  the  Northern  road, — 
that  at  Deer  Lodge  Pass. 

GROWTH   OF    RAILROAD   TRAFFIC. 

That  this  road  will  create  business  for  itself,  and  speedily 
return  the  capital  embarked  in  its  construction,  I  am 
abundantly  persuaded.  This  opinion  is  confirmed  by  the 
highest  authority  on  such  questions  known  to  railroad 
men  in  this  country,  H.  V.  Poor,  Esq.,  who  in  his  admirable 
sketch  of  the  railroads  of  the  United  States,  published  last 
year,  says: 

"  It  is  safe  to  estimate  that  the  railroad  tonnage  of  the  country  would 
dulplicate  itself  as  often  as  once  in  ten  years,  were  there  no  increase 
of  line  or  population,  from  the  progress  made  in  its  industries  and 
in  the  mechanic  arts." 

Mr.  Poor  amply  sustains  this  proposition  by  facts  de- 
Juced  from  the  railroad  history  of  the  country,  and  says : 

"  Our  means  will  increase  just  in  the  degree  in  which  we  render 
available  the  wealth  that  now  lies  dormant  in  our  soil."  * 

*  PHILADELPHIA,  June  30, 1871. 

DEAR  SIR:  There  is,  in  my  opinion,  no  portion  of  our  community  whose  fu 
ture  is  more,  if  even  so  much,  dependent  upon  the  maintenance  of  a  protective 
policy  as  is  the  railroad  one.  When  the  domestic  commerce  thrives,  then  do 
railroad  stocks  pay  dividends.  When  that  commerce  is  sacrificed  at  the  shrine 
of  foreign  trade,  then  do  stockholders  suffer.  Look  to  the  closing  years  of  the 
last  free-trade  period,  say  1859-60,  and  you  will  see  that  $400,000,000  would 
have  bought  the  whole  $1,000,000,000  that  had  then  been  spent  on  roads.  That 
the  reverse  of  this  is  now  the  case  is  due  to  the  fact,  that  for  the  last  ten  years  the 
policy  of  the  country  has  looked  to  the  development  of  our  great  mineral  re 
sources,  and  to  the  emancipation  of  our  roads  from  dependence  on  a  mere  through 
trade  for  which  competition  is  at  all  times  so  great  that  it  is  carried  on  at  the 
lowest  possible  rate  of  profit,  even  when  not  at  an  absolute  loss.  Let  that  de 
pendence  be  re-established  and  our  railroad  companies  will  find  themselves 


THE   NEW  NORTHWEST.  469 

Speaking  of  the  year  1869,  he  says  : 

"  The  tonnage  traffic  of  the  railroads  constructed  the  past  year, 
at  only  one  thousand  tons  to  the  rnile,  will  equal  five  million  tons, 
having  a  value  of  $750,000,000  !  Every  road  constructed  adds  five 
times  its  value  to  the  aggregate  value  of  the  property  of  the  coun 
try.  The  cost  of  the  works  constructed  the  past  year  will  equal  at 
least  $150,000,000.  The  increased  value,  consequently,  of  property 
due  to  the  construction  will  equal  $600,000,000." 

These  observations  of  Mr.  Poor  are  specially  applicable 
to  the  Northen  Pacific  road,  the  construction  of  which  will 
not  only  create  an  immense  volume  of  through  travel,  but 
develop  a  region  not  exceeded  in  native  wealth  by  any 
equal  area  on  the  face  of  the  globe  ;  which  abounds  in  the 
precious  and  other  metals,  in  wheat-lands  and  lumber 
forests,  and  embraces  the  natural  home  of  the  sheep  and 
goat,  and  grazing  fields  in  which  herds  of  cattle  large 
enough  to  supply  our  entire  market,  may  graze  throughout 
the  year,  growing  and  fattening  upon  natural  grasses,  which 
in  the  dry  atmosphere  of  the  country  do  not  decompose  as 

again  in  the  position  from  which  they  had  been  rescued  by  the  passage  of  the 
Morrill  tariff  of  1861. 

How  wonderful  has  been  the  growth  of  our  domestic  commerce  under  the  pro 
tective  system  then  established,  is  shown  in  the  brief  statement  of  facts,  derived 
from  Mr.  Poor's  excellent  "  Manual  of  the  Railroads  of  the  United  States,"  that 
will  now  be  given,  as  follows : — 

Ten  years  since,  say  in  1860,  the  net  tonnage  of  more  than  30,000  miles  of 
road  was  but  18,500,000,  the  growth  of  ten  years  of  peace  at  home  and  war  from 
abroad  on  all  our  industries  under  the  British  free-trade  system  then  existing, 
having  been  but  14,000,000  ;  this,  too,  notwithstanding  an  increase  of  population 
amounting  to  more  than  8,000,000.  Last  year,  at  the  close  of  another  ten  years' 
period  nearly  half  of  which  had  been  attended  with  great  destruction  of  pro 
perty,  and  with  such  waste  of  life  that  the  increase  of  population  had  been  but 
7,000,000,  or  two-thirds  of  what  had  been  anticipated,  the  net  tonnage  of  50,000 
miles  of  road — exclusive  of  coal,  ore,  and  other  low-priced  freights,  exceeding 
20,000,000  tons — had  reached  72,500,000,  giving  an  increase  of  no  less  than 
54,000,000  tons. 

In  the  first  or  free-trade  decade,  the  tonnage  added  was  but  If  tons  to  each 
added  head  of  population.  In  the  last,  or  protective  one,  it  has  proved  to  be 
but  little  short  of  8  tons  to  each  of  the  added  population. 

In  the  first,  the  increase  in  the  value  carried,  per  head  of  our  total  population, 
was  but  $55.  In  the  second,  it  has  been  nearly  thrice  that,  or  $141. 

In  the  first  or  free-trade  one,  the  earnings  remained  precisely  where  they  had 
stood  in  1850,  at  but  $4000  per  mile.  In  the  second,  or  protective  one,  with  a 
decrease  rather  than  an  increase  in  the  rates  of  freight,  they  have  more  than 
doubled,  having  risen  to  more  than  $9000  per  mile. 

In  the  first,  our  policy  had  looked  towards  subjecting  the  country  to  British 
influence,  and  hence  was  it  that  our  railroad  owners  had  been  so  nearly  ruined. 
In  the  second,  it  has  looked  to  the  establishment  of  industrial  and  commercial 
independence,  and  hence  it  is  that  all  our  railroad  owners  have  so  largely 
profited. 

That  the  extraordinary  increase  here  exhibited  of  railroad  transportation  has 
not  only  not  been  attended  with  any  diminution  of  shipping  employed  in  domestic 


470  THE   NEW   NORTHWEST. 

ours  do  when  exposed  to  the  weather,  but  cure  where  they 
grow,  and  feed  herds  of  buffalo,  elk,  antelope  and  mountain 
sheep  the  year  round. 

THE   NEW   NORTHWEST. 

Minnesota,  through  which  the  road  will  be  completed 
by  October,  from  Lake  Superior  to  the  Ked  Eiver,  266 
miles,  is  the  great  wheat  field  of  our  country. J  It  is  a  land 
of  lakes  and  rivers,  of  forest  and  prairie.  Its  farmers  are 
prosperous  and  contented.  Its  population  numbered  6077 
in  1850  ;  had  swollen  to  172,022  by  1860  ;  and  was  found 
to  be  436,057  in  1870.  The  value  of  its  farm  products  as 
reported  by  the  census  of  1870  was  $33,350,923  ;  the  cash 
value  of  its  farms  $$7,621,691 ;  and  its  production  of  wheat 
during  1869  was  about  19,000,000  bushels.  It  contains 
(listen  young  men  who  are  working  for  wages,)  53,459,840 
acres,  of  which  but  3,637,671  are  occupied.  The  remaining 
50,000,000  await  your  coming  for  their  development.  (Ap 
plause.)  It  is  not  yet  fourteen  years  since  the  lumbermen 

commerce,  but  that,  on  the  contrary,  this  last,  after  having  been  paralyzed  un 
der  British  free-trade,  has  grown,  under  protection,  with  extraordinary  rapidity, 
is  proved  by  facts  derived  from  Mr.  Nimmo's  valuable  report  on  our  foreign 
commerce,  and  here  given,  as  follows  : 

In  1850,  the  home  shipping  built  amounted  to  114,000  tons.  In  the  last  three 
years  of  the  free-trade  system,  say  1858-60,«notwithstanding  a  growth  of  popu 
lation  unusually  large  in  its  proportions,  the  average  was  but  112,000. 

In  1870,  after  nine  years  of  protection,  it  has  been  185,000,  and  the  average 
of  the  three  last  years  has  been  182,000,  showing  an  increase  of  more  than  60 
per  cent. 

With  an  increase  of  numbers  in  the  last  decade  of  less  than  25  per  cent,  there 
has  been  an  increase  of  domestic  commerce,  by  land  and  water,  of  more  than 
300  per  cent. — thus  nearly  proving  the  accuracy  of  Commissioner  Wells's  asser 
tion,  made  in  1868,  that  its  growth  had  been  sixteen  times  more  rapid  than  that 
of  the  population. 

Of  the  enormous  increase  thus  exhibited,  not  even  the  fiftieth  part  has  been 
due  to  our  trade  with  the  manufacturing  countries  of  Europe  ;  and  yet,  there  are 
men,  intelligent  men  too,  connected  with  railroads,  who  are  even  now  disposed 
once  again  to  sacrifice  the  great  domestic  commerce  in  the  hope  of  augmenting 
the  insignificant  foreign  one. 

Whether  or  not  this  shall  be  done  will  be  determined  at  the  presidential  elec 
tion  in  1872.  As  that  goes,  so  will  it  be  settled  as  to  whether  we  are  to  go  for 
ward  in  the  direction  of  industrial  and  political  independence,  or  return  to  the 
state  of  subjection  to  British  traders  and  British  bankers  that  existed  in  the 
free-trade  days  of  the  tariff  of  1857.  In  the  one  case,  railroad  owners  will  find 
their  property  improve  from  year  to  year;  whereas,  in  the  other,  they,  or  such 
of  them  at  least  as  had  given  their  influence  in  the  free- trade  direction,  will  find 
that  they  had  been  killing  the  goose  that  had  given  the  golden  eggs. 

Hoping  that  your  patriotic  efforts  may  be  crowned  with  success,  I  remain, 

Very  respectfully,  yours, 

H.  C.  CAREY. 

GEO.  S.  BOWEN,  Esq., 

President  American  Association  Home  Industries,  Chicago,  111. 


THE   NEW   NORTHWEST.  471 

of  Minnesota  were  fed  on  wheat  imported  from  other  States. 
Yet  the  wheat  crop  raised  during  1870,  from  the  small 
part  of  the  State  then  occupied,  is  believed  to  have  been 
not  less  than  30,000,000  bushels.  Time  will  not  permit 
me  even  to  indicate  the  immense  resources  of  this  State  in 
lumber,  iron,  slate,  and  other  commodities,  that  bear  trans 
portation  ;  and  I  leave  Minnesota  with  the  remark  that 
when  the  winter  traveler  west  ward  on  the  Northern  Pacific 
Railroad,  shall  leave  her  limits  and  cross  the  Eed  Kiver  of 
the  North,  he  will  leave  behind  him  the  coldest  part  of  the 
road,  and  that  most  liable  to  obstruction  by  snow.  The 
only  other  point  at  which  he  will,  even  under  exceptional 
circumstances,  meet  with  as  great  a  depression  of  the  mer 
cury  will  be  in  the  neighborhood  of  Fort  Stevenson,  in 
Central  Dakota. 

A   GENIAL   CLIMATE. 

How,  ladies  and  gentlemen,  shall  I  help  you  to  under 
stand  something  about  the  climate  of  the  country  west  of 
Minnesota  ?  To  us  of  the  East  it  seems  incredible  that 
the  temperature  of  the  mountains,  along  a  line  running  be 
tween  the  47th  and  49th  parallels  should  be  so  mild ;  yet 
so  it  is ;  and  the  climate  of  Washington  Territory,  along 
the  49th  parallel,  is  more  equable  the  year  round,  and 
milder  in  winter  than  that  of  Philadelphia  or  Baltimore. 
Indeed,  the  mean  temperature  at  Olympia,  at  the  head  of 
Puget  Sound,  is  that  of  Norfolk,  Va.,  but  the  dwellers  on 
the  Sound  are  strangers  alike  to  the  extreme  heat  of  a  Vir 
ginia  summer  and  the  extreme  cold  of  its  winter.  There 
cattle  are  not  housed  at  any  season,  and  thrive  upon  the 
grasses  they  find  on  the  plains.  In  the  western  valleys  of 
Washington  Territory,  winter  is  unknown.  Snow  comes 
occasionally  to  remind  settlers  of  what  they  used  to  see 
in  the  States  of  the  East ;  but  it  never  lies.  But  once  since 
1847,  when  the  first  settlements  were  made,  have  cattle 
been  deprived  by  snow  for  three  consecutive  days,  of  the 
natural  pasture  furnished  throughout  the  winter  months 
west  of  the  mountains  in  Washington  Territory  and  Oregon. 

The  winter  climate  upon  the  mountains  of  Idaho,  Mon 
tana  and  Dakota,  is  more  severe ;  but  in  their  valleys  the 
buffalo,  elk  and  antelope  have  been  accustomed  to  winter; 
and  domestic  cattle,  worn  by  labor  in  the  service  of  ex 
ploring  expeditions  and  transportation  companies,  are 


472  THE   NEW   NORTHWEST. 

turned  into  the  valleys  and  herded,  and  come  out  in  the 
spring  fat  and  ready  for  another  tour  of  duty.  This  is 
so  inconsistent  with  our  experience,  that  I  beg  leave  to 
fortify  the  statement  with  a  single  authority,  the  equal  to 
which  I  could  produce  by  scores.  I  will,  however,  con 
tent  myself  with  a  brief  extract  from  the  report  of  explora 
tions  of  the  Yellowstone,  made  by  Gen.  Eaynolds,  of  the 
Engineer  Corps  of  the  U.  S.  Army,  who  wintered,  in  1860, 
in  the  valley  of  Deer  Creek,  in  which  the  Northern  Pacific 
Road  will  attain  its  greatest  elevation  and  cross  the  Rocky 
Mountains.  On  this  subject  he  says: 

"  Throughout  the  whole  of  the  season's  march,  the  subsistence 
of  our  animals  had  been  obtained  by  grazing  after  we  had  reached 
camp  in  the  afternoon,  and  for  an  hour  or  two  between  the  dawn  of 
day  and  our  time  of  starting.  The  consequence  was  that  when  we 
reached  our  winter  quarters  there  were  but  few  animals  in  the  train 
that  were  in  a  condition  to  have  continued  the  march  without  a 
generous  grain  diet.  Poorer  arid  more  broken  down  creatures  it 
would  be  difficult  to  find.  In  the  spring  all  were  in  as  fine  condition 
for  commencing  another  season's  work  as  could  be  desired.  A 
greater  change  in  their  appearance  could  not  have  been  produced, 
even  if  they  had  been  grain-fed  arid  stable-housed  all  winter.  Only 
one  was  lost,  the  furious  storm  of  December  coming  on  before  it 
had  gained  sufficient  strength  to  endure  it.  This  fact ',  that  seventy 
exhausted  animals  turned  out  to  winter  on  the  plains  on  the  first  of 
November  came  out  in  the  best  condition,  and  with  the  loss  of  but  one, 
is  the  most  forcible  commentary  I  can  make  on  the  quality  of  the 
grass  and  the  character  of  the  winter." 

This  seems  incredible,  but  many  degrees  to  the  north  of 
our  territories  are  immense  valleys,  which,  if  the  testimony 
of  British  officers,  civil  and  military,  and  of  missionaries 
and  settlers  who  have  dwelt  there  for  years,  may  be  be 
lieved,  rival  Minnesota  in  wheat-producing  capacity,  and 
eastern  Oregon  and  Washington  Territory  in  the  mildness 
of  their  mean  temperature.  Exploration  and  settlement 
have  abolished  the  "  The  Great  American  Desert,"  of  which 
these  territories  formed  a  conspicuous  part,  and  it  no  longer 
finds  a  place  on  maps.  And  the  Mormons  have  demons 
trated  that  by  conducting  the  melting  snow  of  the  moun 
tains  to  the  foot-hills  and  valleys,  the  whole  region  can  be 
made  to  bloom  as  the  rose,  and  bear  crops  of  cereals,  roots 
and  fruit  equal  to  those  yielded  by  the  best  farms  in  the 
choice  valleys  of  Pennsylvania. 

WOOL  AND  BEET-ROOT  SUGAR. 

Since  these  apparently  inhospitable  regions  have  been 
penetrated  by  railroads,  and  mining  adventure  has  created 


THE   NEW  NORTHWEST.  473 

settlements  up  even  to  the  northern  boundary  of  Dakota, 
Montana  and  Idaho,  we  are  discovering  why  we  have  not 
succeeded  in  raising  wool,  and  why  we  are  still,  while 
boasting  of  our.  agricultural  productions,  dependent  for 
our  supply  of  wool,  upon  non-manufacturing  countries 
which  are  not  famed  for  their  agricultural  resources  or 
skill.  The  reason  is  found  in  the  fact  that  we  have  not 
carried  flocks  to  those  portions  of  our  country  which  are 
pre-eminently  adapted  to  the  support  of  wool-bearing 
animals. 

Mountainous  and  volcanic  as  are  our  territories,  which 
extend  from  the  32d  to  the  49th  parallel,  they  are  peculiarly 
adapted  to  sheep  culture.  With  their  settlement  we  shall 
become  the  greatest  wool-producing  country  of  the  world, 
though  our  present  production  gives  but  small  promise  of 
such  a  result.  The  sources  and  amount  of  the  wool-clip 
of  1868  were  in  round  figures  about  as  follows : 

Pounds. 

British  North  American  Provinces...  10,000,000 

Australia,  South  America,  and  Africa.  76,000,000 

United  States 100,000,000 

Spain,  Portugal  and  Italy 119,000,000 

France 123,000,000 

European  Russia 125,000,000 

Germany 200,000,000 

Great  Britain 260,000,000 

Asia 470,000,000 

Thus  it  appears  that  Asia,  Australia,  Africa  and  South 
America,  which  furnish  no  such  markets  for  mutton  as 
the  commercial  and  manufacturing  centres  of  Europe  and 
this  country,  and  where  sheep  must  be  raised  for  the  wool 
alone,  are  its  great  producers.  Why  is  wool  chief  among 
the  staple  exports  of  South  America  ?  Because  her  pam 
pas  present  the  same  conditions  as  our  territories.  Why 
has  Australia  built  up  a  great  city  more  by  its  wool  trade 
than  by  its  gold  ?  It  is  because  her  sheep  walks  are  dry  and 
covered  with  bunch  grass,  which  is  cured  naturally  in  the 
field  as  is  the  case  in  our  Territories.  Why  does  Asia  pro 
duce  more  wool  than  Great  Britain  and  Germany  together, 
and  almost  as  much  as  Great  Britain,  Germany  and  the 
United  States  ?  It  is  because  the  grasses  of  the  elevated 
plains  on  which  her  countless  flocks  of  sheep  and  goats 
range  are  the  same  nutritious,  aromatic  grasses  upon 
which  the  elk,  the  buffalo  and  the  mountain  sheep  have  fed 


47-i  THE    NEW   NORTHWEST. 

through  all   time   upon   "The   Great  American  Desert." 
(Applause.) 

Under  the  impulse  given  to  this  interest  by  the  Union 
and  Central  road,  flocks  numbering  thousands,  collected 
in  Illinois,  Wisconsin,  Iowa,  and  more  eastern  States  have 
been  transferred  to  such  plains  and  valleys  as  are  accessible 
by  the  road,  and  where  the  expense  of  raising  sheep  is  but 
the  cost  of  the  first  flock  and  of  herding.  There  the  finest 
wool  may  be  produced,  and  with  increasing  railroad 
facilities,  mining,  manufacturing,  and  commercial  centres 
will  furnish  markets  for  mutton,  and  add  to  the  wool 
grower's  profits.  To  say  that  the  wool-clip  of  the  United 
States,  as  shown  by  the  census  of  1880,  will  exceed  that 
of  Great  Britain  is  not  to  offer  a  prediction,  but  to  assert 
a  foregone  conclusion ;  and  it  is  also  safe  to  say  that  the 
clip  of  that  year  will  embrace  not  only  wool  of  all  grades 
of  sheep,  but  of  the  Cashmere,  Angora,  and  other  goats, 
the  value  of  whose  hair  is  so  well  known  to  manufacturers 
and  merchants.  But  more  than  this,  remembering  the 
rapidity  with  which  flocks  increase,  I  predict  that  at  an 
early  day  our  wool  clip  will  equal  that  of  Asia,*  which 

*  On  the  day  after  the  delivery  of  the  text,  my  attention  was  invited  to  the 
following  striking  confirmation  of  my  views  furnished  by  M.  Alcan,  Professor 
of  Spinning  and  Weaving  at  the  Conservatoire  Imperial  des  Arts,  Ac. 

APPROXIMATE  PRODUCTION  OP  WOOLS  IN  1866. 

[Translated  from  Alcan's  "  Etudes  sur  les  Arts  Textile  a  1'Exposition  Uni- 
verselle  de  1867  "  for  the  April  number  of  the  Bulletin  of  the  National  Associa 
tion  of  Wool  Manufacturers.] 

"  The  quantity  of  the  production  of  wools  in  weight  may  be  reckoned  ap 
proximately  by  the  number  of  sheep  in  each  country.  We  estimate  the  sheep 
at  the  numbers  indicated  in  the  following  table : 

No.  of  Sheep. 

France 30,000,000 

Algeria 10,000,000 

Russia 54,000,000 

England 26,376,000 

Austria 27,000,000 

Prussia,  Zollverein 24,000,000 

Ottoman  Empire 32,000,000 

Australia 35,000,000 

Cape  of  Good  Hope 12,000,000        .  - 

New  Zealand 15,000,000 

The  Equator  or  La  Plata 30,000,000 

Spain 20,000,000 

Italy 8,500,000 

Belgium 3,000,000 

The  Low  Countries 1,500,000 

Portugal 2,417,000 

Total,         330,783,000 
"Remarks  upon  the  numbers  of  the  preceding  table, — If  we  compare  the  present 


THE  NEW  NORTHWEST.  475 

will  insure  us  supremacy  in  the  manufacture  of  the  entire 
range  of  woolen  and  worsted  goods. 

And  with  this  increased  production  of  wool,  will  come 
another  great  industry.  You  will  question  my  judgment 
when  I  tell  you  that  the  territory  along  the  46th,  47th, 
48th  and  49th  degrees  of  latitude  high  up  the  mountain 
sides  is  to  be  a  great  sugar-producing  country.  Yet  as 
sure  as  the  world  moves  and  science  helps  man  to  supply 
his  wants  cheaply,  the  country  along  the  routes  of  the 
Union  and  Central  and  the  Northern  Pacific  Eailroads  will 
in  a  few  years  produce  immense  quantities  of  sugar.  Of 
course,  I  speak  of  beet -root  sugar,  the  manufacture  of 
which  will  thrive  not  only  along  our  northern  boundary, 
but  in  the  more  northern  settlements  of  the  Assineboine 
and  Saskatchewan  valleys  as  it  does  in  Eussia,  Sweden 
and  Norway ;  as  it  is  already  doing  in  California,  Illinois 
and  Wisconsin,  and  will  do  in  all  the  States  of  the 
Northwest.  Many  causes  conspire  to  make  the  introduc 
tion  of  this  industry  into  our  country  a  necessity  ;  and  in 
the  region  of  cheap  land,  abundant  fuel  and  pure  water 
from  the  mountain  snows,  and  in  which  the  cost  of  trans 
portation  more  than  doubles  the  price  of  cane  sugar,  it 
must  find  an  early  and  extensive  development. 

To  show  that  these  views  are  not  new  or  strained,  permit 
me  to  bring  to  your  notice  a  letter  I  had  the  honor  to  address 
to  Dr.  Latham,  a  cultivated  and  intelligent  gentleman,  who, 
after  spending  years  in  the  Territories,  devoted  last  winter 
to  bringing  their  resources  to  the  attention  of  the  wool- 
growers  and  woolen  manufacturers  of  the  Eastern  States. 

"  HOUSE  OF  REPRESENTATIVES, 
Washington,  D.  C.,  Dec.  18,  1870. 
"  DR.  H.  LATHAM, 

"  LARAMIE, 

"  Wyoming  Territory. 

"  DEAR  SIR. — I  must  admit  that  I  thought  some  of  the  statements 
you  made  when  I  met  you  at  Laramie,  and  you  were  kind  enough 

number  of  sheep  as  indicated  in  the  preceding  table  with  the  numbers  hereto 
fore  given  by  us,  it  will  not  be  difficult  to  recognize  that  while  the  production  of 
sheep  has  decreased  or  remained  stationary  in  Europe,  it  has  prodigiously  de- 
yeloped  itself  in  the  new  countries  beyond  the  ocean.  Thus,  for  example,  the 
number  of  wool-bearing  animals  has  diminished  in  England,  in  Spain,  and  even 
in  France,  if  we  do  not  include  Algeria;  and  it  has  remained  nearly  stationary 
in  the  different  parts  of  Germany.  On  the  contrary,  the  development  exhibits 
an  enormous  progression  at  the  Cape,  in  Australia,  and,  above  all,  in  La  Plata. 
In  seven  years,  from  1860  to  1867,  the  production  has  been  raised  nearly  108 
f  >r  cent,  for  the  first  of  these  countries,  nearly  100  per  cent,  for  the  second,  and 
5-48  per  cent,  for  the  third." 


476  THE   NEW   NORTHWEST. 

to  accompany  us  eastward,  were  exaggerated ;  but  subsequent 
observation  arid  study  have  satisfied  me  that  you  did  not  lully  indi 
cate  the  capacity  of  the  territories  for  varied  production  and  the 
sustenance  of  a  numerous  and  prosperous  population.* 

"  Two  industries,  each  of  primary  importance  to  the  country, 
should  be  introduced  at  an  early  day,  because  both  will  find  there 
the  conditions  under  which  they  may  be  brought  almost  im 
mediately  to  absolute  perfection.  I  mean  the  growth  of  wool,  both 
from  the  Angora  and  Cashmere  goats  and  sheep,  and  the  produc 
tion  of  beet-root  sugar.  For  the  latter,  Grant,  in  his  admirable 
little  book,  says  the  primary  essentials  are  cheap  land  and  fuel  and 
pure  water.  All  these  you  have  wherever  the  melting  snow  of  the 
mountains  can  be  carried  for  irrigation,  and  in  the  neighborhood 
of  all  your  mountain  streams.  Your  natural  grasses  and  aromatic 
herbage  are  identical  with  those  of  the  great  sheep-fields  of  Asia 
and  Australia;  and  should  you  establish  the  production  of  the  beet, 
and  the  manufacture  of  sugar  on  a  large  scale,  you  will  find,  as  it 
has  been  found  everywhere  else,  that  three  tons  of  the  refuse  beet, 
from  which  the  saccharine  matter  has  been  expressed,  will  be 
equivalent  to  two  tons  of  the  best  hay  in  sustaining  and  fattening 
sheep  and  cattle.  It,  therefore,  seems  to  me  that  you  will  render 
a  very  important  service,  not  only  to  your  own  section,  but  to  the 
country  at  large,  if,  by  making  known  these  peculiar  resources  you 
promote  the  establishment  of  two  such  vital  industries.  Either  of 
them  will  doubtless  succeed  if  undertaken  by  proper  hands ;  but 
both  should  be  established,  as  each  will  contribute  to  the  success 
of  the  other. 

"Again  thanking  you  for  the  important  information  you  have 
given  me,  and  wishing  you  abundant  success  in  your  efforts  to  pro 
mote  the  development  of  this  extended  and  interesting  portion  of 
our  country,  I  remain 

"Yours,  very  truly, 

"WM.  D.  KELLEY." 

MONTANA — LIEUT.  DOANE'S  REPORT. 

Thanks  to  the  admirable  scientific  training  given  our 
army  officers  at  West  Point,  and  the  desire  of  that  dis 
tinguished  soldier  and  son  of  Pennsylvania,  Gen.  Win- 
field  S.  Hancock,  (applause,)  to  ascertain  and  disclose  the 
resources  of  the  district  of  which  he  is  in  command,  we 
have  a  recent  official  report  on  the  characteristics  of  a 
hitherto  unexplored  section  of  Montana,  the  wonders  of 


*  Leaving  Philadelphia  on  the  20th  of  July,  I  passed  about  in  four  weeks 
Colorado,  Wyoming  and  Utah;  most  of  the  time  in  the  Laramie  valley,  Wyom 
ing.  Much  of  each  day  was  passed  on  horseback,  or  in  open  wagon;  and  I  am 
satisfied  that  when  the  population  of  our  country  shall  number  hundreds  of 
millions,  the  slopes  and  valleys  of  the  Rocky  Mountains  will  be  the  great  source 
from  which  will  be  drawn  cattle,  sheep,  tallow,  hides,  wool,  butter,  cheese  and  con 
densed  milk.  On  one  estate  near  Laramie,  that  of  Mr.  Hutton,  are  more  than 
8000  cattle,  6000  sheep,  and  500  horses  and  breeding  mares.  My  friend  Dr 
Latham's  stock  embraces  more  than  4500  cattle  and  3000  sheep. 


THE  NEW  NORTHWEST.  477 

which  not  only  exceed  those  of  Niagara  and  the  geysers 
of  California,  but  rival  in  magnitude  and  extraordinary- 
combination  those  of  the  Yo  Semite,  the  canons  of  Colorado 
and  the  geysers  of  Iceland.  But  I  cannot  pause  even  to 
allude  to  these.  Tourists  and  men  of  science  will  give  the 
world  many  a  description  of  them.  My  purpose  is  to 
illustrate  the  climate  and  the  fertility  not  only  of  the  val 
leys  but  of  the  mountains,  which  bear  trees  rising  beyond 
one  hundred  feet  in  height  at  an  elevation  which  in  New 
York  or  New  England  would  mark  the  region  of  perpetual 
snow. 

I  have  here  Executive  Document  No.  51,  of  the  Third 
Session,  Forty- first  Congress.  It  is  the  report  (and  you 
will  see  that  it  is  quite  brief)  of  Lieut.  Gustavus  C.  Doane, 
upon  the  so-called  Yellowstone  expedition  of  1870.  It  is 
Lieut.  Doane's  account  of  a  brief  tour  made  by  the  Sur 
veyor  General  of  Montana,  whose  duty  it  was  to  survey 
the  yet  hidden  region  of  his  district,  and  who  applied  to 
Gen.  Hancock  for  an  escort  to  enable  him  to  do  so  with 
safety.  The  General  promptly  complied  with  the  request,. 
and  put  the  escort  under  the  charge  of  Lieut.  Doane,  with 
instructions  to  keep  a  record,  noting  the  condition  of  the 
barometer  and  thermometer,  and  the  elevation  of  each 
day's  camp,  and  to  report  these  and  such  other  facts  as 
might  in  his  opinion  be  of  general  interest. 

The  party  were  out  thirty-four  days.  Their  point  of 
departure  was  Fort  Ellis,  which  is  at  an  elevation  of  4911 
feet,  and  at  which  the  thermometer  at  noon,  on  the  day  of 
their  departure,  August  22d,  1870,  stood  at  92°.  On  the 
morning  of  the  third  day  they  found  themselves  at  an 
elevation  of  4837  feet,  the  barometer  standing  at  25.10, 
the  thermometer  40°.  In  noting  that  day's  experience, 
Lieut.  Doane  says : 

"  Throughout  the  forenoon  it  rained  occasional  showers,  but  be 
fore  12  o'clock  the  clouds  rolled  away  in  heavy  masses  along  the 
mountain  sides,  the  sun  came  out  and  the  atmosphere  was  clear 
again.  From  this  point  a  beautiful  view  is  obtained.  The  mining 
carnp  of  Emigrant  Gulch  is  nearly  opposite,  on  a  small  stream  com 
ing  down  from  the  mountains  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  river.  A 
tew  settlements  have  been  made  in  this  vicinity,  and  small  herds  of 
cattle  range  at  will  over  the  broad  extent  of  the  valley.  Our  camp 
was  situated  at  the  base  of  the  foot-hills,  near  a  small  grove,  from 
which  flowed  several  large  springs  of  clear  water,  capable  of  irrigat 
ing  the  whole  bottom  in  front.  The  soil  here  is  very  fertile,  and 
lies  favorably  for  irrigation  ;  timber  is  convenient,  water  everywhere 
abundant,  arid  the  climate  for  this  region  remarkably  mild.  Re- 


478  THE  NEW  NORTHWEST. 

sidents  informed  me  that  snow  seldom  fell  in  the  ralley.  Stock  of 
every  kind  subsist  through  winter  without  being  fed  or  sheltered. 
Excepting  the  Judith  Basin,  I  have  seen  no  district  in  the  western 
territories  so  eligible  for  settlement  as  the  upper  valley  of  the 
Yellowstone.  Several  of  the  party  were  very  successful  during  the 
morning  in  fishing  for  trout,  of  which  we  afterward  had  an  abundant 
and  continued  supply.  The  Yellowstone  here  is  from  50  to  100 
yards  wide,  and  at  the  lowest  stage  four  feet  deep  on  the  riffles,  run 
ning  over  a  bed  of  drift  boulders  and  gravel  with  a  very  rapid  current 
The  flow  of  water  is  fully  equal  to  that  of  the  Missouri  at  Fort  Ben- 
ton,  owing  to  the  rapidity  of  the  current,  though  the  channel  is 
much  more  narrow." 

By  the  fifth  day  the  party  had  attained  an  elevation  of 
7331  feet,  where  the  thermometer  at  noon  marked  72°. 
Here  they  found  themselves  in  the  midst  of  indescribable 
volcanic  wonders.  They  were,  however,  notwithstanding 
their  great  elevation,  in  the  midst  of  groves  of  pine  and 
aspen. 

In  his  notes  of  the  eighth  day  Lieut.  Doane  says : 

"Barometer,  23°;  thermometer,  50°;  elevation,  7270  feet. 
"  Coming   into   camp    in   advance,   passing  through  a  grove  of 
pine " 

Can  one  who  has  not  visited  the  pampas  of  South 
America,  Australia,  the  elevated  plains  of  Asia,  or  our 
own  sheep-growing  territory,  imagine  a  forest  of  pines  at 
48°  north  latitude,  rising  from  an  elevation  of  7270  feet 
above  the  level  of  the  sea  ? 

"  Coming  into  camp  in  advance,  passing  through  a  grove  of  pine, 
on  the  margin  of  a  little  creek,  I  was  met  face  to  face  on  the  path, 
by  two  magnificent  buck  elk,  one  of  which  I  wounded,  but  lost  in 
the  woods.  Mr.  Smith  started  up  a  small  bear,  which  also  got 
away.  The  ground  was  everywhere  tracked  by  the  passage  of  herds 
of  elk  and  mountain  sheep ;  and  bear  sign  was  everywhere  visible." 

The  tenth  day  found  the  party  at  an  elevation  of  7697 
feet,  with  the  thermometer  at  46°  in  the  morning.  De 
scribing  the  high  hills,  (one  of  which,  Langford's  Peak, 
rises  abruptly  to  the  height  of  10,327  feet,)  by  which  they 
were  surrounded,  and  through  which  the  waters  of  the 
Yellowstone  poured  in  one  of  the  grandest  cataracts  of  the 
world,  Lieut.  Doane  says : 

"  On  the  caps  of  these  dizzy  heights,  mountain  sheep  and  elk  rest 
during  the  night.  I  followed  down  the  stream  on  horseback,  to 
where  it  breaks  through  the  range,  threading  my  way  through  the 
forest  on  game  trails  with  little  difficulty.  Selecting  the  channel 
of  a  small  creek  and  leaving  the  horses,  I  followed  it  down  on  foot, 


THE   NEW  NORTHWEST.  479 

wading  in  the  bed  of  the  stream,  which  fell  off  at  an  angle  of  about 
30°  between  walls  of  gypsum.  Private  McConnell  accompanied  me. 
On  entering  the  ravine  we  came  at  once  to  hot  springs  of  sulphur, 
sulphate  of  copper,  alum,  steam  jets,  etc.,  in  endless  variety, 
some  of  them  of  very  peculiar  form.  One  of  them  in  particular  of 
sulphur  had  built  up  a  tall  spire  from  the  slope  of  the  wall,  standing 
out  like  an  enormous  horn,  with  hot  water  trickling  down  its  sides. 
The  creek  ran  on  a  bed  of  solid  rock,  in  many  places  smooth  and 
slippery,  in  others  obstructed  by  masses  of  debris  formed  from  the 
overhanging  cliffs  of  the  sulphuretted  limestone  above.  After  de 
scending  for  three  miles  in  the  channel  we  came  to  a  sort  of  bench 
or  terrace,  the  same  one  seen  previously  in  following  down  the 
creek  from  our  first  camp  in  the  basin.  Here  we  found  a  large 
flock  of  mountain  sheep,  very  tame,  and  greatly  astonished,  no 
doubt,  at  our  sudden  appearance.  McConnell  killed  one  and 
wounded  another,  whereupon  the  rest  disappeared,  clambering  up 
the  steep  walls  with  a  celerity  truly  astonishing." 

On  the  twelfth  day,  at  an  elevation  of  7487  feet,  they 
discovered  a  recent  volcano,  throwing  steam  and  mud  to 
the  height  of  300  feet.  I  refer  to  this,  not  to  dwell  upon 
this  wonder  (for  it  was  but  one  among  a  myriad),  but  as 
evidence  of  the  condition  of  vegetation  and  the  capacity 
of  the  country  to  sustain  flocks  at  that  elevation.  Lieut. 
Doane  says : 

"  The  distances  to  which  this  mud  has  been  thrown,  are  truly 
astonishing.  Directly  above  the  crater  rises  a  steep  bank,  a  hundred 
feet  in  height,  on  the  apex  of  which  the  tallest  tree  near  is  110  feet 
high.  The  topmost  branches  of  this  tree  were  loaded  with  mud  200 
feet  above  and  50  feet  laterally  away  from  the  crater.  The  ground 
and  fallen  trees  near  by,  were  splashed  at  a  horizontal  distance  of 
200  feet.  The  trees  below  were  either  broken  down  or  their  branches 
festooned  with  dry  mud,  which  appeared  in  the  tops  of  trees  grow 
ing  on  the  side  hill  from  the  same  level  with  the  crater,  50  feet  in 
height,  and  at  a  distance  of  180  feet  from  the  volcano." 

Certainly  vegetation  is  not  stunted  by  climate  when  in 
this  elevated  and  volcanic  region  upon  the  apex  of  the 
hills,  trees  attain  the  height  of  110  feet! 

But  Lieut.  Doane's  report  is  replete  with  evidence  that 
the  valleys  are  capable  of  sheltering  sheep  and  cattle  from 
the  severity  of  climate  that  prevails  upon  the  greater  ele 
vations  during  the  winter. 

But  the  route  of  the  Northern  Pacific  Eailroad  is  not 
obstructed  by  mountains  like  these;  the  highest  point  it 
attains  being  the  Deer  Lodge  Pass  through  the  Eocky 
Mountains,  which  is  4950  feet,  being  3285  feet  below  the 
grade  of  the  Union  Pacific  Eoad  at  Sherman,  where,  two 


480  THE   NEW  NORTHWEST. 

years  ago,  I  gathered  a  bouquet  composed  of  the  wild 
flowers  common  to  Eastern  Pennsylvania. 

SETTLEMENTS  ALONG  THE   LINE. 

It  must  be  admitted  that  a  portion  of  the  land  in  Dakota, 
Montana,  and  Idaho,  through  which  this  road  will  run,  is  un- 
suited  to  cultivation,  but  the  proportion  is  much  less  than 
will  be  found  on  the  line  of  any  more  southern  road.  The 
alkali  plains  alone  which  the  Union  and  Central  road  tra 
verses  are  broader  than  the  breadth  of  all  the  bad  lands 
along  the  line  of  the  Northern  route.  Governor  Stevens, 
who  superintended  the  original  government  survey  of 
this  line,  and  frequently  crossed  the  country,  said,  that 
"not  more  than  one-fifth  of  the  land  from  Red  River  to 
Puget  Sound  is  unsuited  to  cultivation,  and  this  fifth  is 
largely  made  up  of  mountains  covered  with  bunch  grass 
and  valuable  timber,  and  filled  with  precious  metals." 
But,  ladies  and  gentlemen,  were  it  true  that  but  one-fifth 
instead  of  four-fifths  of  the  land  granted  to  the  Northern 
Pacific  Company  between  the  western  boundary  of  Minne 
sota  and  the  eastern  boundary  of  Washington  and  Oregon, 
is  presently  available  for  the  purposes  of  settlement,  the 
grant  would,  in  my  judgment,  be  adequate  for  the  con 
struction  of  the  road.  Indeed,  I  believe  that  the  lands 
granted  in  Minnesota,  Oregon  and  Washington  Territory, 
would  build  and  equip  the  road. 

COMMERCIAL  ADVANTAGES. 

No  part  of  the  capital  employed  in  constructing  this 
road  will  be  long  unproductive,  as  a  remunerative  busi 
ness  awaits  the  completion  of  each  section.  From  the 
Missouri  at  Omaha  to  the  Sacramento  no  navigable  stream 
crosses  or  approaches  the  Union  and  Central  road,  while 
the  route  of  this  road  is  traversed,  at  intervals  of  about 
two  hundred  miles,  along  its  whole  extent  by  navigable 
streams  upon  which  there  are  considerable  settlements. 
One  eastern  terminus  of  the  road  is  the  westernmost 
point  of  our  magnificent  system  of  Lake  navigation — the 
other  is  the  head  of  navigation  on  the  Mississippi  river 
at  St.  Paul,  a  city  whose  population  numbers  about  25,000. 
Duluth,  its  lake  terminus,  is  rising  into  commercial  im 
portance  more  rapidly  than  did  Chicago,  and  with  the  pro 
mise  of  continuous  growth.  It  is  the  port  through  which 
the  people  of  Minnesota  and  the  entire  new  Northwest 


THE    NEW   NORTHWEST.  481 

will  exchange  commodities  not  only  with  all  the  lake 
ports  of  the  United  States  and  British  America,  but  with 
Europe,  and  the  commercial  cities  of  the  Atlantic  seaboard. 
It  will  be  the  chief  outlet  for  the  increasing  tens  of  mil 
lions  of  bushels  of  wheat  and  feet  of  lumber,  produced 
by  the  farmers  and  lumbermen  of  Minnesota.  Though 
Duluth  is  not  yet  four  years  old,  her  foreign  commerce  is 
large  enough  to  command  the  attention  of  the  Treasury 
Department,  and  require  the  appointment  of  a  deputy  col 
lector  and  several  minor  officers  of  customs. 

THE  NORTHERN  RIVER  SYSTEM. 

The  settlements  on  the  Eed  River  of  the  North,  the  west 
ern  boundary  of  Minnesota,  are  numerous,  and  the  trade 
of  the  extended  and  fertile  valleys  it  drains  will  await  the 
completion  of  the  road  to  that  river,  which  will  be  accom 
plished  by  the  1st  of  September.  Beyond  Minnesota,  the 
line  crosses  or  runs  upon  the  banks 'of  the  Dakota,  Mis 
souri  and  Yellowstone,  which  are  east  of  the  Rocky  Moun 
tains,  and  navigable  for  hundreds  or  thousands  of  miles; 
and  beyond  the  Rocky  Mountains,  the  Snake,  the  Cowlitz 
and  the  Columbia  rivers,  will  prove  immediate  and  valu 
able  tributaries  to  its  business.  Its  western  termini  are  at 
Portland  on  the  Willamette,  twelve  miles  above  its  con 
fluence  with  the  Columbia,  which  is  already  an  important 
commercial  centre,  and  a  point  yet  to  be  determined  on 
the  waters  of  Puget  Sound,  which  are  the  predestined  field 
of  a  commerce  that,  at  an  early  day,  will  exceed  that  of 
San  Francisco,  and,  in  the  not  very  distant  future,  equal 
the  present  commerce  of  New  York.  I  cannot  give  the 
figures  to  show  the  extent  of  the  trade  of  the  Columbia 
river  and  its  confluents,  but  am  able  to  assure  you  from 
actual  observation  that  it  has  been  large  and  profitable 
enough  to  give  the  original  stockholders  of  the  Oregon 
Steam  Navigation  Co.  prominent  places  in  the  roll  of  heavy 
capitalists  on  the  Pacific  Coast. 

THE   FUTURE   PACIFIC   METROPOLIS. 

That  the  commercial  metropolis  of  the  Pacific  coast 
will  be  south  of  Puget  Sound  I  have  never  believed. 
Observation  confirmed  the  conviction  with  which  Mr. 
Whitney  had  impressed  me.  And  early  in  August,  1869, 
just  after  my  return  from  the  Pacific  coast,  at  the  request 
of  Col.  John  W.  Forney,  I  held  a  protracted  conversation 
31 


482  THE   NEW  NORTHWEST. 

with  Mr.  Joseph  I.  Gilbert,  an  experienced  phonographic 
reporter,  who,  on  the  27th  of  that  month,  presented  to  the 
readers  of  the  Press  the  substance  of  the  interview.  Re 
curring  to  the  Press  of  that  date,  I  find  that,  speaking  on 
this  point,  I  said : 

"  Allow  me  to  state  one  conclusion  from  personal  observation.  It 
is  that  San  Francisco  will,  in  the  course  of  time,  cease  to  be  the 
great  city  of  the  Pacific  coast.  Her  location  constitutes  her  for 
the  present  the  entrepot  for  all  the  commerce  of  the  coast,  embrac 
ing1  the  trade  from  the  South  American  coast,  from  the  Sandwich  Is 
lands,  from  China,  Japan,  British  Columbia,  and  our  territory  north 
of  that  city.  The  Bay  of  San  Francisco,  too,  is  quite  capable  of 
accommodating  the  commerce  of  the  world.  It  is,  I  think,  un 
equalled  as  a  bay,  in  extent,  beauty  and  safety.  The  city  has  made 
most  magnificent  strides.  She  has  her  dry-dock,  her  ample  wharves, 
her  steam-tugs,  her  coast  defences,  and  has  made  very  considerable 
progress  in  manufactures.  But  notwithstanding  all  these  advan 
tages,  my  firm  impression  is  that  the  great  city  of  the  Pacific  coast 
will  have  its  location  on  or  near  the  waters  of  Puget  Sound. 

"  Here  are  to  be  found  in  abundance  timber,  coal,  iron,  fish,  wheat, 
all  domestic  grasses,  the  potato,  apple,  pear,  plum,  and  during  more 
than  half  the  year,  all  the  fruits  known  to  our  own  tables.  Here, 
in  my  judgment,  will  be  located  the  great  city  of  the  Pacific  coast, 
as,  owing  to  the  peculiar  conformation  of  the  Sound,  communication 
may  easily  be  had  between  distant  parts  of  this  territory  by  water. 

"  Another  consideration  is  that  a  city  located  here  would  be  prac 
tically  nearer  to  China  than  is  San  Francisco;  because  vessels  leav 
ing  San  Francisco  for  China,  notwithstanding  the  point  for  which 
they  are  destined  is  south  of  their  point  of  departure,  are  compelled 
on  account  of  the  prevailing  winds,  to  make  what  sailors  call  a 
"northing,"  quite  up  to  the  Straits  of  Fuca;  in  consequence  of 
which  a  vessel  starting  from  the  latter  point  for  the  same  destina 
tion  would  have  an  advantage  of  three  or  four  days  over  her  San 
Francisco  competitor." 


SOME    OFFICIAL    TESTIMONY. 

But,  ladies  and  gentlemen,  let  me  hasten  on  and  show 
you  by  official  testimony  the  advantages  presented  by  this 
route  to  the  Pacific  over  any  other  north  of  the  32d  parallel, 
on  which,  as  I  have  said,  the  almost  tropical  climate  would 
prove  an  obstacle  to  general  travel  and  commerce.  In  pur 
suance  of  the  act  of  Congress  of  March  3, 1853,  the  Topo 
graphical  Engineers  designated  by  the  Secretary  of  War, 
surveyed  seven  routes  extending  from  the  line  of  the  North 
ern  Pacific  south  ward  to  the  32d  parallel.  Their  reports  were 
referred  by  the  Secretary  of  War  for  examination  to  Cap 
tain  A.  A.  Humphreys  and  Lieut.  Gr.  K.  Warren,  both  of 


THE   NEW   NORTHWEST.  483 

whom  are  well  known  to  the  country  for  the  distinguished 
services  they  rendered  as  commanding  generals  during  the 
late  war,  and  the  former  of  whom  is  now  at  the  head  of  the 
Engineer  Department  of  the  United  States  Army.  On  the 
5th  of  February  1855,  these  officers  submitted  the  results 
of  their  analysis  and  comparisons  in  an  elaborate  report, 
in  which  speaking  of  the  route  near  the  47th  and  49th 
parallel  they  say : 

"  The  advantages  of  this  route  are — its  low  profile,  which  is  im 
portant  in  relation  to  climate ;  its  easy  grades,  and  small  amount  of 
ascents  and  descents,  both  important  if  the  road  should  be  developed, 
to  its  full  working  power ;  the  great  extension  west  of  the  prairie 
lands  ;  in  the  supplies  of  timber  over  the  western  half  of  the  route ; 
the  facilities  which  the  Columbia  River  and  its  tributaries,  and  the 
Missouri,  will  afford  to  the  construction  of  the  road ;  in  the  short 
distance  from  the  Missisippi  to  a  seaport  of  the  Pacific  ;  in  the  west 
ern  terminus  of  the  road  on  Puget  Sound  being  nearer  to  the  ports 
of  Asia  than  the  termini  of  the  other  routes ;  in  the  proximity  of 
the  eastern  terminus  to  Lake  Superior,  from  which  a  continuous  navi 
gation  for  sea-going  vessels  extends  to  the  Atlantic  Ocean ;  and  in  the 
existence  of  coal  on  Puget  Sound." 

The  explorations  had  been  but  preliminary  and  had  not 
disclosed  the  important  fact  that  an  abundant  supply  of 
coal  is  distributed  at  easy  points  along  the  whole  route.* 

On  page  107  of  the  first  volume  of  the  report,  to  which 
I  refer  for  a  moment,  is  found  a  tabular  statement,  showing 
the  relative  distance  by  each  of  the  seven  routes  surveyed  ; 
the  sum  of  ascents  and  descents :  the  length  of  level  route 
of  equal  working  expense ;  the  comparative  cost  of  differ 
ent  routes ;  the  number  of  miles  of  route  through  arable 
land ;  the  number  of  miles  of  route  through  lands  gene 
rally  uncultivated,  arable  soil  being  found  in  small  areas ; 
number  of  square  miles  of  sums  of  areas  of  largest  bodies 
of  arable  land  in  uncultivable  region ;  number  of  miles 
at  an  elevation  less  than  1000  feet;  number  at  an  eleva 
tion  greater  than  1000  and  less  than  2000 ;  greater  than 
2000  and  less  than  3000 ;  greater  than  3000  and  less  than 
4000 ;  greater  than  4000  and  less  than  5000  ;  greater  than 
5000  and  less  than  6000,  at  which  point  the  Northern 
route  disappears  from  the  table,  while  two  of  the  routes 
have  each  twenty  miles  at  grades  above  10,000  feet,  and 
both  of  which  it  would  be  necessary  to  tunnel  at  an  eleva- 

*  San  Francisco  and  her  ocean  steamers  are  now  supplied  with  coal  mined  on 
Puget  Sound,  near  the  western  terminus  of  the  Northern  Pacific  Railroad. 
Twenty-five  thousand  tons  were  shipped  for  this  purpose  in  1870. 


484:  THE   NEW   NORTHWEST. 

tion  of  954:0  feet,  which  is  4590  feet  above  the  highest 
summit  the  Northern  road  will  cross. 

GRADES — A  NATURAL   PATHWAY. 

In  each  of  these  respects  the  Northern  route  is  shown  to 
compare  favorably  with  all  of  its  competitors.  But  its 
most  remarkable  advantage  appears  under  the  head  of  the 
sum  of  ascents  and  descents.  High  rates  under  this  head 
indicate  increased  percentages  of  danger  and  current  ex 
pense.  The  lower  the  rate  of  ascent  and  descent  the  safer 
and  more  economical  is  travel.  And  while  the  Northern 
route  is  charged  under  this  head  with  but  19,100  feet,  the 
route  comparing  most  favorably  with  it  in  this  respect  is 
that  on  the  41st  and  42d  parallels,  in  which  the  sum  is 
29,120,  an  increase  of  more  than  fifty  per  cent.;  and  the 
extreme  contrast  is  that  of  the  route  on  the  38th  and  39th 
parallels,  in  which  the  sum  reaches  56,514. 

The  study  of  these  voluminous  reports  will  satisfy  any 
reasonable  man  that  from  Duluth  to  a  point  on  Puget 
Sound  is  nature's  own  route  for  a  Pacific  railroad.  So 
startling  indeed  were  the  advantages  presented  by  this 
route,  that  the  then  Secretary  of  War,  Jefferson  Davis, 
struck  from  the  report  of  Governor  Stevens,  since  so  dis 
tinguished  as  a  soldier  and  engineer,  the  estimate  he  pre 
sented  of  the  cost,  which  was  $117,121,000,  and  inserted 
in  lieu  thereof  $130,781,000.  Davis'  keen  foresight  showed 
him  that  the  development  of  the  then  almost  unknown 
Northwest,  by  the  construction  of  a  road  upon  easy  gra 
dients  through  a  region  of  such  wonderful  resources, 
would,  in  a  few  years,  place  his  beloved  South  and  slavery 
at  the  mercy  of  a  free  people,  overwhelmingly  outnumber 
ing  those  of  the  plantation  States.  How  reckless  and  un 
just  this  action  was,  is  proven  by  the  fact  that  all  of  the  more 
recent  estimates  fix  the  cost  at  but  little  more  than  sixty- 
six  per  cent,  of  that  of  Governor  Stevens,  or  $77,000,000 
for  the  road  and  original  equipment. 

EFFECT   ON   AMERICAN   COMMERCE. 

The  effect  the  completion  of  this  road,  with  its  immense 
advantages  of  position  and  grades,  is  to  have  upon  our 
commerce  cannot  be  predicted.  I  reiterate  the  assertion 
that  the  trade  of  the  Pacific  Ocean  must  find  its  chief 
entrepot  on  Puget  Sound  ;  and  as  evidence  of  my  apprecia 
tion  of  the  future  extent  and  value  of  this  commerce  let 


THE   NEW  NORTHWEST.  485 

me  again  refer  to  the  remarks  I  made  in  Congress  on  the 
26th  of  April,  1866.  Replying  to  a  distinguished  repre 
sentative  from  Chicago,  111.,  who  had  reminded  members 
who  were  disposed  to  vote  for  aid  to  the  Northern  Pacific 
Road,  that  a  Congressional  election  was  at  hand,  I  said : 

"  I  appeal  from  the  constituents  of  the  gentleman  from  Chicago 
[Mr.  Went  worth],  on  the  eve  of  an  election,  to  posterity,  and  ask 
gentlemen  to  view  the  proposed  enterprise  in  the  light  in  which 
future  generations  will  behold  it.  They  will  look  beyond  the  vast 
and  undeveloped  empire  I  have  indicated ;  for  beyond  it  lies  the 
broad  Pacific,  capable  of  bearing  a  commerce  a  thousand  times 
heavier  than  has  ever  chafed  the  waters  of  the  Atlantic,  but  on 
which  our  flag  is  seen  floating  only  from  the  masts  of  coasting  craft 
or  whalers  wending  their  slow  way  to  the  Northern  seas  in  quest 
of  hard  earned  wealth.  So  slight  is  our  power  on  this  ocean  that 
the  recently  pardoned  rebel  Semmes,  with  a  single  vessel,  destroyed 
nearly  a  hundred  of  our  peaceable  whalers,  giving  their  cargoes, 
gathered  by  years  of  dangerous  toil,  to  the  flames  or  the  waves.  It 
bounds  our  country  for  more  than  a  thousand  miles,  and  our  mari 
time  power,  which  could  not  now  protect  a  mile  of  it,  should  be 
seen  and  felt  upon  it,  and  our  flag  and  white  sails  or  the  curling 
smoke  of  our  steamers  should  shadow  its  every  wave. 

"  The  commerce  of  the  Pacific  Ocean  belongs  to  us ;  and  we 
should  confirm  our  title  by  the  right  of  occupancy ;  for  when  we 
cast  our  eyes  beyond  its  placid  surface,  we  behold  what  is  to  be  our 
next  conquest.  The  Old  World  is  to  be  awakened  by  American 
ideas.  Its  unnumbered  people  are  to  be  quickened,  instructed,  and 
redeemed  by  American  enterprise.  Some  statisticians  tell  us  that 
there  are  750,000,000  people  in  the  ancient  theocratic  countries  of 
the  East,  which  is  the  West  to  which  the  star  of  our  commercial 
empire  will  next  take  its  way.  Others  put  the  population  at 
1,000,000,000  ;  and  others  at  1,300,000,000.  There,  where  civiliza 
tion  dawned  arid  the  drowsy  past  yet  lingers,  the  first  impulses  of  a 
new  cycle  begin  to  be  felt.  Japan  is  yielding  to  the  impulses  of  our 
a<i-e.  The  Chinese  wall  is  crumbling  away.  It  was  but  yesterday 
that  I  had  a  letter  informing  me  that  our  countryman,  Dr.  Martin, 
interpreter  of  the  American  Legation  at  Pekin,  under  the  employ 
ment  of  the  Chinese  Government,  had  rendered  into  that  language 
our  Wheaton's  Law  of  Nations.  Thus,  that  vast  and  long  isolated 
Power  is  preparing  to  enter  into  commercial  connections  with  the 
world.  The  ancient  civilization  of  Asia  is  giving  way,  the  doctrine 
of  sacred  castes  is  about  to  yield  to  the  sublimer  creed  of  man's 
freedom  and  equality.  Muscular  labor  will  soon  be  done  there  by 
the  potent  agents  we  now  employ — coal  and  iron — and  the  genius 
of  the  buried  dead,  embodied  in  mechanism,  will  soon  relieve  their 
toiling  millions  as  it  now  does  ours.  Their  whole  life  is  to  be  quick 
ened  by  modern  enterprise,  and  they  will  swell  the  numbers  of  the 
people  on  our  Pacific  slope." 

When  it  is  asserted  that  these  roads  will  give  us  the 
control  of  the  commerce  of  China,  purblind  philosophers 
point  to  the  small  portion  of  that  trade  that  is  carried  by 


486  THE    NEW   NORTHWEST. 

the  Central  and  Union  road  as  proof  that  that  commerce 
will  never  cross  our  country.  It  is  not  two  years  since 
that  road  was  completed.  Commerce  follows  cheap  and 
rapid  lines  of  transit,  and  railroad  fares  are  regulated  by 
the  amount  of  business  done.  Thus  in  1850,  by  the  ave 
rage  rate  of  fares  on  American  roads,  it  cost  $20  to  trans 
port  a  ton  of  wheat  100  miles;  in  1870,  a  ton  of  wheat 
was  transported  the  same  distance  for  $1.25.  (Applause.) 
With  increase  of  business  the  Central  and  Union  Pacific 
Eoad  will  be  able,  while  increasing  its  profits,  to  reduce 
its  rates  for  freight  and  travel.  It  is  doing  it  already.  Its 
present  rates  for  passengers  and  freight  compare,  as  I  have 
said,  most  favorably  with  those  of  1869  ;  and  when  twenty 
or  thirty  other  branches,  like  those  to  Denver  and  Salt 
Lake  City,  shall  throw  their  business  upon  the  trunk  line, 
and  when  other  Evanstons  and  Cheyennes  shall  have 
sprung  up,  when  Omaha  shall  be  a  city  like  San  Francisco, 
and  San  Francisco  a  city  like  Philadelphia,  all  of  which  may 
occur  within  the  next  quarter  of  a  century,  who  shall  say 
how  small  will  be  the  charge  for  carrying  a  chest  of  tea 
or  a  case  of  silk  across  the  continent  ?  It  will  be  very 
small,  and  when  railroads  shall  be  able  to  carry  this  freight 
as  cheaply  and  more  quickly  than  it  can  be  moved  by 
steamers,  the  trade  of  China  and  Japan  will  cross  our  con 
tinent,  and  my  prophecies  of  1846  and  1850  will  be  more 
than  fulfilled,  as  the  Pennsylvania  road  will  carry  the 
freight  of  two  Pacific  roads — one  from  San  Francisco  and 
the  other  from  the  Columbia  and  Puget  Sound.  (Applause.) 

PACIFIC  COAST  HARBOES. — PUGET  SOUND. 
Among  the  strange  contrasts  presented  by  our  two 
coasts,  few  are  more  impressive  than  the  coast  line  itself. 
Harbors  are  numerous  along  the  Atlantic  coast.  No  sea 
board  State  is  without  one  or  more  good  harbors.  Count 
them,  from  Gralveston  northward  and  eastward  to  Portland, 
Maine,  and  the  number  will  surprise  you.  The  agricul 
tural  and  mineral  productions  of  almost  every  State  could 
be  floated  to  the  sea,  while  our  long  Pacific  coast,  south  of 
Alaska,  presents  but  four  harbors  or  fair  points  for  com 
mercial  centres,  the  Bays  of  San  Diego  and  San  Francisco, 
the  Columbia  River  and  Puget  Sound,  the  entrance  to 
which  is  the  Straits  of  Fuca.  The  Alleghanies  are  inland 
mountains;  but  the  "coast  range,"  as  their  name  indicates, 
lie  along  the  coast  of  the  Pacific,  leaving  harbors  only 


THE   NEW  NORTHWEST.  487 

where  the  great  waters  have  forced  their  way  through  the 
rocks. 

As  I  have  said,  the  commerce  of  China  and  Japan  must 
near  our  coast  north  of  the  Bay  of  San  Francisco,  north 
even  of  the  mouth  of  the  Columbia,  and  at  a  point  near 
to  the  Straits  of  Fuca.  While,  therefore,  the  commerce 
of  the  Pacific  must  to  some  extent  be  shared  by  San 
Diego,  San  Francisco,  Portland,  and  Astoria,  a  city  yet  to 
arise  on  Puget  Sound  will  be  its  great  centre. 

PRODUCTIONS,    RESOURCES   AND    SEASONS. 

Would  that  I  could  convey  to  your  rnincls  a  moderate 
conception  of  the  wealth  and  climate  of  this  far  North 
western  country  and  of  the  body  of  water  called  the  Straits 
of  Fuca  and  Puget  Sound — so  calm,  so  deep,  so  guarded 
by  forests  such  as  no  man  who  has  not  visited  them  has 
ever  seen.  The  Straits  of  Fuca  run  in  an  almost  direct 
course  more  than  ninety  miles,  at  an  average  width  of  more 
than  ten  miles.  The  shore-line  of  Puget  Sound  extends 
nearly  1900  miles,  but,  such  is  its  conformation,  that  the 
points  at  greatest  distance  from  each  other  are  not  four 
hundred  miles  apart.  The  Sound  is  a  series  of  canals, 
bays,  inlets  and  harbors.  Gov.  Stevens,  who  lived  on  its 
shores  for  a  number  of  years,  likened  it  to  a  tree,  with  a 
very  recognizable  body  called  Admiralty  Inlet,  and  innu 
merable  side-branches,  the  trunk  and  branches  rilling  a 
region  seventy  nautical  miles  in  length  from  north  to 
south,  and  thirty  in  breath  from  east  to  west.  In  speak 
ing  of  it  again,  he  said : 

"  On  the  whole  west  coast,  from  San  Diego  to  the  north,  nothing 
like  this  is  met.  All  the  water  channels  of  which  Admiralty  Inlet 
is  composed,  are  comparatively  narrow  and  long.  They  have  more 
or  less  bold  shores  and  are  throughout  very  deep  arid  abrupt,  so 
much  so  that  in  many  places  a  ship's  side  will  strike  the  shore  be 
fore  the  keel  will  touch  the  ground.  Even  in  the  interior  and  hid 
den  parts,  depths  of  50  and  100  fathoms  occur  as  broad  as  De  Fuca 
Btrait  itself.  Vancouver  found  60  fathoms  near  the  Vashon  Island 
within  a  cable  length  of  the  shore,  and  in  Possesion  Sound  he  found 
no  soundings  with  a  line  of  110  fathoms.  Our  modern,  more  exten 
sive  soundings  prove  that  this  depth  diminishes  toward  the  extre 
mities  of  the  inlets  and  basins.  Nothing  can  exceed  the  beauty 
arid  safety  of  these  waters  for  navigation.  Not  a  shoal  exists  within 
them;  riot  a  hidden  rock;  no  sudden  overfalls  of  the  water  or  the 
air;  no  such  strong  flaws  of  the  wind  as  in  other  narrow  waters,  for 
instance  as  in  those  of  Magellan's  Straits.  And  there  are  in  this 
region  so  many  excellent  arid  most  secure  ports  that  the  commercial 
marine  of  the  Pacific  Ocean  may  be  here  easily  accommodated." 


488  THE   NEW   NORTHWEST 

There  is  but  little  waste  land  in  Oregon  and  Washing 
ton  Territory.  Oregon  embraces  60,975,360  acres,  and  its 
population  in  1870  was  but  90,933.  Washington  Territory 
contains  112,730,240  acres,  and  the  census  takers  found 
but  23,955  civilized  people  dwelling  upon  them.  This 
State  and  Territory  are  among  the  most  fertile  and  pro 
ductive  sections  of  our  country.  The  wheat  of  Oregon 
and  Washington,  as  you  may  ascertain  by  consulting  the 
commercial  papers  of  San  Francisco,  commands,  in  the 
markets  of  that  city,  ten  cents  per  bushel  more  than  the 
wheat  of  California;  and  oats  from  the  Territory  are  worth 
fifteen  cents  per  cental  more  than  the  best  California  oats. 
As  we  get  the  wheat  of  the  entire  Pacific  slope  through 
California,  we  know  it  only  as  California  wheat ;  but  in 
the  home  market  the  difference  I  have  indicated  is  con 
stantly  maintained  by  reason  of  the  superiority  of  the 
more  northern  grain. 

The  forests  that  shelter  these  waters  are  composed  of 
trees  running  up  from  250  to  350  feet,  with  a  diameter  of 
from  8  to  12  feet,  and  throwing  out  their  first  arms  at 
from  60  to  100  feet  above  the  ground.  In  these  glorious 
solitudes,  upon  the  waters  of  Puget  Sound  there  are  in 
operation  saw  mills  that  will  this  year  ship  largely  over 
200,000,000  feet  of  superior  lumber  to  San  Francisco,  Cal- 
lao,  Valparaiso,  the  Sandwich  Islands,  Australia  and  China. 
These  forests,  an  inexhaustible  store  of  wealth  in  them 
selves,  are  underlaid  by  rich  deposits  of  coal,  iron,  gold  and 
silver.  The  beds  of  iron  and  coal  are  already  utilized  to 
some  extent;  and  the  existence  of  the  precious  metals  is 
established  by  the  fact  that  the  washings  of  the  water 
courses  furnish  traces  of  gold  and  other  metals.  Of  the 
fish  with  which  these  waters  teem,  I  dare  not  tax  your 
credulity  by  speaking. 

Though  bounded  by  the  49th  degree  of  latitude,  the  cli 
mate  is  genial  throughout  the  year.  So  mild  are  the  win 
ters — indeed,  I  may  say,  so  free  is  the  country  from  win 
ter — that,  notwithstanding  the  moi«ture  of  the  climate, 
west  of  the  Coast  Range,  no  provision  is  made  for  housing 
cattle  at  any  season  of  the  year.  In  the  month  of  .July, 
1869,  within  the  limits  of  Astor's  old  fort,  near  the  mouth 
of  the  Columbia  River,  I  picked  from  the  orchard  of  a 
farmer  who  had  gone  thither  from  Bedford  County,  Pa.,  a 
variety  of  delicious  apples,  pears  and  plums;  and  from 
vines  near  the  trunks  of  the  trees,  raspberries,  strawberries 


THE   N£W   NORTHWEST.  489 

and  blackberries — a  combination  of  fruits  that  could  not 
be  found  in  the  month  of  July  upon  the  best  cultivated  and 
most  fortunately  situated  farm  in  Pennsylvania.  And  a 
week  before,  our  party  had  found  Indian  women  and  chil 
dren  vending  these  fruits  and  the  apricot  in  the  streets  of 
Victoria,  the  capital  of  British  Columbia. 

At  Olympia,  the  capital  of  Washington  Territory,  situ 
ated  at  the  head  of  Puget  Sound,  it  was  my  pleasure  to 
pass  the  greater  part  of  a  day  with  my  young  friend  El- 
wood  Evans,  Esq.,  son  of  Chas.  Evans,  the  press  manufac 
turer  of  this  city  (whom  I  recognize  among  my  auditors), 
and  to  gather  luscious  fruit  from  tree  and  vine  in  the  gar 
dens  attached  to  his  comfortable  home  and  his  law-office 
hard  by  upon  the  same  street. 

THE   WORK  OF   DEVELOPMENT. 

Do  you  ask,  as  others  have  done,  why  with  such  stores 
of  wealth,  waiting  to  respond  with  such  boundless  generos 
ity  to  the  demands  of  man,  the  population  does  not  equal 
one  man,  woman  or  child  to  each  square  mile  ?  If  you 
do,  the  answer  is  ready.  It  is  because  the  people  and 
Government  of  the  United  States  did  not  promptly  respond 
to  the  suggestion  of  Asa  Whitney,  and  either  by  the  means 
proposed  by  him,  or  those  they  should  select,  connect  our 
Pacific  territory  with  the  great  lakes  by  a  railway.  Had  that 
been  done,  and  the  way  then  been  opened  to  immigrants, 
Washington  Territory  would  long  since  have  been  divided 
into  two  or  more  States,  California  and  Oregon  would  be 
great  commercial  rivals,  and  the  population  of  our  Pacific 
States  would  equal  or  exceed  that  of  busy  and  blessed  New 
England. 

To  reach  the  golden  lands  of  the  Pacific  coast  has  been 
a  matter  of  too  much  time  and  expense  for  the  poor  man, 
and  too  full  of  trials  for  families.  The  fact  that  in  spite 
of  these  almost  insuperable  difficulties,  so  many  intelligent 
people  have  found  their  way  thither  is  a  testimonial  to  the 
wonderful  attractions  of  the  country,  and  the  immense  re 
wards  it  offers  to  industry  and  enterprise. 

Build  this  road,  open  these  multiform  and  exhaustless 
resources  to  the  poor  but  enterprising  people  of  the  Eastern 
States  and  Europe,  and  population  will  flow  into  them  so 
rapidly  that  they  who  shall  a  few  years  hence  hear  the 
story  of  the  doubts  of  to-day  about  the  Northern  Pacific 


490  THE   NEW  NORTHWEST. 

Kailroad  will  experience  wonder  similar  to  that  which  you 
feel  at  the  want  of  forecast  that  characterized  the  people 
of  Pennsylvania  twenty- five  years  ago,  when  they  shrank 
from  embarking  so  small  a  percentage  of  their  capital  in 
building  the  Pennsylvania  Central  road ;  and  in  a  few  years 
the  trunk  line  of  this  great  thoroughfare  will  carry  the 
trade  of  innumerable  lateral  branches,  penetrating  not  only 
our  valleys  but  those  of  the  British  Provinces  to  the  North, 
whose  people  will  thus  be  made  tributary  to  us  forever,  or 
induced  to  unite  their  destinies  with  ours,  under  a  common 
constitution  and  flag.  This  is  not  declamation  or  prophecy. 
It  is  the  announcement  of  conclusions  that  flow  irresistibly 
from  an  ample  store  of  unquestioned  facts. 

Do  you  ask  whence  the  population  would  have  come  to 
effect  the  changes  I  have  indicated  ?  By  the  construction 
of  the  road,  the  character  of  the  climate  and  resources  of 
the  country  would  have  been  disclosed  long  years  ago,  and 
the  sheep-growers  of  the  States  from  Vermont  to  Iowa 
would  have  transferred  their  flocks  to  the  Asiatic  and  Aus 
tralian  fields  that  slope  the  Eocky  Mountains.  The  hardy 
lumbermen  from  the  forests  of  New  England  and  northern 
Pennsylvania  would  have  found  their  way  to  these 
richer  forests  in  more  genial  climes.  Nor  would  we  then 
have  suffered  the  decline  in  our  ship-building  so  much  and 
so  justly  bemoaned;  for  difficult  of  access  as  the  country 
is.  and  slender  as  is  its  population  and  commerce,  we  found 
along  these  woody  shores  ship-yards,  having  on  the  stocks 
first-class  ships,  the  outer  planks  of  which  were  without  a 
joint,  having  been  cut  sheer  from  one  of  the  rnonarchs  of 
the  forest  on  the  shores  of  the  Sound.  The  increased  coast 
trade  of  the  Pacific  and  commerce  between  our  Atlantic  and 
Pacific  ports  would  have  kept  alive  this  decaying  branch 
of  business,  which  with  the  completion  of  the  Northern 
Pacific  Railroad,  must  revive  with  grander  proportions 
than  it  ever  assumed  in  the  past. 

Where  will  the  people  come  from  to  make  this  wealth 
available,  to  build  cities  at  the  points  along  this  road 
at  which  railroad  and  river  traffic  shall  intersect,  to 
raise  provisions  for  the  mining  camps,  and  to  build  up  com 
merce  on  Puget  Sound  and  the  Columbia  Eiver?  What 
American,  whose  memory  is  good  for  a  quarter  of  a  cen 
tury,  asks  this  question?  Where  have  the  people  come 
from  who,  since  we  discussed  the  propriety  of  building  tho 
Pennsylvania  Railroad,  and  Asa  Whitney  submitted  the 


THE   NEW   NORTHWEST.  491 

project  of  a  Pacific  road,  have  settled  Iowa  and  Wisconsin, 
whose  joint  population,  though  then  but  200,000,  now  num 
bers  two  millions  and  a  quarter,  each  having  over  a  mil 
lion  ?  Where  did  the  people  come  from  who,  within  a 
brief  quarter  of  a  century  have  doubled  the  population  of 
the  Northern  States  of  the  Union  ?  Where  have  the  peo 
ple  come  from  who  have  meanwhile  populated  so  many 
of  the  gold  and  silver-producing  sections  of  our  vast  terri 
tories,  and  built  up  the  States  of  Texas,  California,  Min 
nesota  and  Oregon  ?  Let  Edward  Young,  Esq.,  Chief  of 
the  Bureau  of  Statistics,  answer  these  questions.  I  hold  in 
my  hand  a  recent  report  of  his — a  document  that  should 
be  circulated  by  millions  through  the  Eastern  States  and 
Europe.  It  is  entitled,  "Special  Eeport  on  Immigration, 
accompanying  Information  for  Immigrants  relative  to  the 
Prices  and  Eentals  of  Lands,  the  Staple  Products,  Facili 
ties  of  Access  to  Market,  Cost  of  Farm  Stock,  Kind  of 
Labor  in  Demand  in  the  Western  and  Southern  States, 
etc."  This  report  shows  that  during  the  8  years  terminat 
ing  with  the  31st  of  December,  1846,  we  received  736,887 
immigrants,  of  whom  416,950  came  from  the  British  Isles. 
But,  Mr.  Doubter,  you  interrupt  me  to  ask  whether  this 
tide  of  immigration  will  continue?  whether  it  has  not 
reached  its  climax  ?  The  Chief  of  the  Bureau  of  Statistics 
shall  answer  you  again;  for  his  report  shows  that  during 
the  like  period  of  8  years,  terminating  the  31st  of  last  Decem 
ber,  we  received  2,307,554  immigrants,  of  whom  there  came 
from  the  British  Isles  1,015,517,  or  more  than  33  per  cent. 
more  than  the  entire  immigration  during  the  former  8  years. 
Yes,  the  tide  of  immigration  will  continue,  and  for  many 
years  it  will  increase.  Each  year  will  see  its  volume 
rolling  in,  until  regenerated  Europe  shall  give  the  laborer 
ample  remuneration,  political  power  and  social  considera 
tion.  (Applause.)  Our  cheap  land  and  democratic  insti 
tutions  will  bring  her  bone  and  sinew  and  enterprise  to 
develop  the  resources  and  add  to  the  wealth  and  power  of 
our  country.  (Loud  applause.)  And  nothing  will  do 
more  to  promote  the  movement  than  the  advertisement  to 
all  the  world  of  the  vast  resources  of  the  region  through 
which  this  road  is  to  run  and  the  wonderful  field  for 
labor,  enterprise  and  adventure  at  its  Pacific  termini. 

PHILADELPHIA   INTERESTS. 

But  what  will  be  the  effect  of  the  road  upon  Philadelphia  ? 
What  relations  has  all  this  to  our  oity  and  State  ?"   These 


492  THE   NEW   NORTHWEST. 

questions,  which  you  propounded  to  me  in  your  invitation, 
have,  I  think,  been  answered  by  what  I  have  said.  What 
State  or  city  shares  more  largely  than  ours  in  the  general 
prosperity  or  depression  of  the  country  ?  Who  will  be 
more  benefited  by  the  cheapening  of  freight  on  raw  ma 
terials  and  manufactured  articles  than  we  ?  What  Ameri 
can  city  produces  so  many  of  the  comforts  and  luxuries 
which  the  people  along  the  line  of  this  road  will  consume 
as  Philadelphia?  Their  demands  will  stimulate  our  in 
dustry,  and  their  abounding  means  will  enable  them  to  re 
ward  it  abundantly.  The  construction  of  one  railroad 
bridge — that  over  the  Mississippi  Kiver  at  St.  Louis — gave 
to  one  Philadelphia  firm,  the  Wm.  Butcher  Steel  Works, 
a  contract  for  $500,000  worth  of  steel.  And  even  now, 
hundreds  of  Philadelphia  mechanics  are  busy  building  lo 
comotives  and  passenger  and  freight  cars  for  the  Northern 
Pacific  Railroad. 

I  need  not  elaborate  this  point.  We  are  a  community 
of  working  people.  (The  mass  of  the  citizens  of  Philadel 
phia  absolutely  live  by  manual  labor.)  The  prosperity  of 
the  capitalists  of  this  city  is  dependent  upon  the  steady 
employment  and  liberal  wages  of  her  working  people. 
(Applause.)  When  labor  is  idle,  capital  is  idle,  or  em 
ployed  at  little  profit ;  when  the  laborer  earns  no  wages, 
the  landlord  is  not  always  sure  of  his  rent.  (Laughter  and 
applause.)  The  effect  that  the  construction  of  this  road 
will  have  upon  the  employment  and  wages  of  laboring  peo 
ple  was  discussed  by  me  in  the  Congressional  remarks  to 
which  I  have  already  referred.  Let  me  read  a  paragraph 
or  two  from  what  I  then  said : 

"  But  the  inviting  field  of  the  ocean,  and  the  vast  field  of  enter 
prise  and  reward  open  to  us  in  Asia  are  not  the  only  considerations 
that  induce  me  to  support  this  bill.  The  laboring  people  of  every 
eastern  city  have  an  intense  interest  in  this  question.  The  safety 
of  our  country  depends  upon  the  intelligence,  the  virtue,  the  stability 
of  our  laboring  people.  He  legislates  not  wisely  for  a  democratic 
republic  who  does  not  make  it  the  aim  of  all  his  acts  to  improve  the 
material  condition  of  the  great  laboring  masses  of  the  country.  If 
we  would  perpetuate  our  institutions,  we  must  see  that  the  wages 
of  labor  are  so  maintained  that  the  children  of  the  working 
man  shall  grow  up  amid  the  endearments  of  home,  and  with  the  ex 
pectation  that  their  children  shall  find  more  elegance  and  refinement 
in  their  homes  than  their  parents  were  familiar  with  in  childhood. 

"  The  construction  of  a  road  through  our  northern  gold  region  will 
open  a  field  that  will  be  a  constant  refuge  for  any  unemployed  labor 
of  our  eastern  States.  There  will  be  a  refuge  for  those  masses  of  in- 


THE   NEW   NORTHWEST.  493 

ppnious  workmen  who  are  jostled  each  year  by  lack  of  adjustment 
of  their  numbers  to  the  demand  for  their  branch  of  labor,  or  are  de 
prived  of  the  advantage  of  the  skill  they  acquired  in  youth  by  the 
invention  of  labor-saving  machinery ;  and  instead  of  finding  them 
selves,  as  age  gathers  on  their  brow,  without  the  means  of  liveli 
hood,  rich  fields  of  enterprise,  easily  reached,  will  cheer  their  de 
clining  years. 

"  But,  again,  the  depression  of  our  laboring  people  springs  not 
alone  or  chiefly  from  local  causes.  Beyond  the  Atlantic  Ocean 
there  are  250,000,000  people,  in  every  community  of  which  laboring 
men  are  held  as  raw  material ;  and  under  the  grasping  influence  of 
capital,  and  the  oppression  of  despotic  government  are  held  in  such 
bondage,  that  they  are  made  to  subsist,  even  when  they  toil  most 
assiduously,  upon  a  modicum  of  the  elements  of  life,  upon  a  minimum 
of  the  amount  that  will  keep  the  soul  in  a  tolerably  sound  body. 
Escaping  from  this  subjection,  they  are  borne  to  our  shores  by  tens 
and  hundreds  of  thousands  each  year.  They  are  strangers  in  a 
strange  land,  many  of  them  unacquainted  with  our  language  and 
habits,  and  are  unconsciously  and  unwillingly  the  means  of  depress 
ing  wages.  But  if  we  give  the  company  the  means  to  inaugurate 
work  on  this  road,  we  will  not  only  relieve  the  laboring  masses  of 
our  crowded  eastern  cities,  but  furnish  employment  for  more  than 
the  annual  influx  of  those  whom  we  gladly  welcome,  because  they 
strengthen  and  enrich  us  by  their  toil.  Could  we  drain  Europe  of 
its  surplus  laborers  we  would  raise  her  wages  as  she  now  too  often 
depresses  ours. 

•'  What  will  be  the  true  policy  of  the  builders  of  this  road  ?  Will 
it  not  be  to  employ  as  laborers  the  heads  of  families,  and  to  pay  them 
with  land  and  money,  and  settle  the  families  along  the  line  of  the 
road,  so  that  the  laborer  of  one  year  will  in  the  next  farm  his  land 
and  supply  fresh  laborers  with  bread  ?  Thus  will  he  who  enters  into 
«n  engagement  with  the  company  a  pauper,  or  little  better,  find  him 
self  at  the  end  of  a  year  or  two  an  independent  farmer  upon  the 
world's  great  commercial  highway.  The  managers  of  the  road  must 
pursue  this  policy,  and  will  thus  create  business  for  and  guard  their 
road;  thus,  too,  they  will  quicken  the  mineral  and  agricultural  re 
sources  of  the  country,  and  give  to  the  tax  collector,  whether  at  a 
port  of  entry  or  in  the  service  of  the  internal  revenue  department, 
more  money  each  year  than  this  bill  is  likely  to  cause  to  be  taken 
from  the  treasury. 

"  I  ask  gentlemen  in  considering  this  question  to  rise  to  its  dignity 
and  grandeur.  I  am,  sir,  a  devotee  to  freedom,  but  would  make 
every  country  in  the  world  tributary  to  my  own.  I  delight  in  every 
manifestation  of  my  country's  power,  and  glow  with  pride  as  I  con 
template  its  gigantic  proportions,  and  see  how  rapidly  its  people 
subdue  the  wilderness,  and  would,  as  I  have  said,  make  every  na 
tion  tributary  to  its  power.  But  I  would  do  this,  not  by  oppressing 
any  people,  not  by  war  with  any  government,  but  by  improving  the 
condition  of  the  masses  of  my  countrymen  and  those  who  may  be 
come  such  by  immigration,  and  showing  the  rulers  and  people  of  the 
world  how  speedily  free  institutions  exalt  the  poor  and  oppressed  of 
all  nations  into  free,  self-sustaining  and  self-governing  citizens.  It 
is  in  our  power  to  do  this,  arid  by  no  other  means  can  we  do  it  so 
well  or  so  quickly  as  by  passing  this  supplement  and  vivifying  the 
charter  granted  to  the  Northern  Pacific  Railroad  Company." 


49 ±  THE    NEW   NORTHWEST. 

But,  ladies  and  gentlemen,  I  have  detained  you  too  long, 
and  must  close.  Not,  however,  until  I  shall  have  reminded 
you  that  the  grades  and  snows  of  the  Alleghanies  have  not 
interfered  with  the  prosperity  of  the  Pennsylvania  Kail 
road  Company.  That  road  has  not  been  a  failure.  It  has 
done  something  for  the  improvement  of  Philadelphia.  It 
is  the  most  profitable  railroad,  and  most  powerful  corpora 
tion  in  the  United  States.  (Applause.)  It  has  stretched 
its  controlling  influence  clear  across  the  Continent.  Its 
vice-president,  our  esteemed  townsman,  Thomas  A.  Scott, 
Esq.,  is  the  master-spirit  of  the  Union  Pacific  Company, 
and  of  more  than  one  line  connecting  it  with  Philadelphia. 
(Applause.)  Roads  owned  or  managed  by  the  Pennsylva 
nia  Company  await  the  business  of  the  Northern  Pacific 
road,  both  at  St.  Paul  and  Duluth.  It  has  built  a  road  to 
Erie,  our  beautiful  City  of  the  Lakes,  where  vessels  charged 
with  freight  at  Duluth  will  in  the  early  spring  and  later 
autumn  of  each  year  discharge  cargo  for  New  York  and 
Boston,  and  throughout  the  season  of  Lake  navigation,  for 
Philadelphia  and  Baltimore ;  and  it  requires  but  little 
power  of  the  imagination  to  behold  Erie  expanding  into 
generous  rivalry  with  Buffalo,  Cleveland  and  Detroit. 

Though  the  great  characteristics  of  Philadelphia  will  al 
ways  be  those  of  a  manufacturing  city,  her  commerce  is  to 
revive.  She  will  have  not  a  line  but  numerous  lines  of 
steamships ;  and  many  of  the  men  who  now  hear  me  will 
see  the  day  when  her  existing  wharf  line  will  be  wholly 
inadequate  for  her  commerce.  Indeed  the  completion  of 
the  Northern  Pacific  road,  with  the  steadily  increasing  trade 
of  the  Central  route,  will  settle  the  now  vexed  question  of 
a  railroad  along  the  entire  river  front,  and  require  the  con 
struction  of  docks  from  Greenwich  Point  to  Richmond. 
But  familiar  as  you  are  with  the  resources  of  our  city  and 
State,  and  the  advanced  condition  of  our  industries,  I  leave 
you  to  estimate  the  impulse  that  will  be  given  to  every  in 
terest  and  industry  of  our  people  by  the  early  completion 
of  the  Northern  Pacific  Railroad.  (Amid  earnest  and  pro 
longed  applause  the  speaker  retired.) 


INDEX. 


Abolished,  internal  revenue  should  be. 

333. 

Abolish  the  revenue  system,  450. 
Abrogation  of  reciprocity  treaty,  306. 
Absurdities  of  revenue  report.  273 

of  Wells,  288. 

Absurdity  of  Wells'  positions,  256. 
Abyssinia,  American  pumps  in,  329. 
Acadian  coal,  314. 
Acceptance  of  nomination,  397. 
Accommodations  of  Philadelphia,  420. 
Act  for  Pennsylvania  Central,  460. 
for  the  coasting  trade,  430. 
of  Congress   to    survey   route   for 

Pacific  road,  459. 
to  prohibit  coolie  trade,  404. 
Acquisition  of  San  Domingo,  430. 
Additional  consumers,  248. 
Address  at  Milwaukee,  185. 
at  Montgomery,  159. 
at  New  Orleans,  146. 
at  Philadelphia,  171. 
of  Mr.  Niell,  397. 
on  North  Pacific  Railway,  454. 
Admiralty  Inlet,  487. 
Ad  valorem  duties,  379. 
Advantage  of  protecting  coal,  92. 
Advantages,  commercial,  of  the  North 

Pacific,  480. 
of  Alabama,  161. 
of  Northern  laborers,  184. 
of  route  of  Northern  Pacific  road, 

466. 

Advice  to  emigrants,  181. 
Age  improves  whisky,  364. 

of  steel  approaching,  95. 
Agents  of  civilization,  162. 
Aggregate  deposits  in  savingbanks,  289. 
Agony,  year  of,  259. 
Agricultural  implements,  182. 

produce,  abundance  of,  without  a 

market,  xi. 
Agriculture  and  manufactures  mutually 

dependent,  112. 
in  Pennsylvania,  323. 
South,  178,  188. 

too  large  a  proportion  of  our  peo 
ple  engaged  in,  xxix. 
Aim  of  American  statesmen,  405. 
of  slaveholders,  211. 


Alabama,  natural  wealth  of,  160. 
resources  of,  161. 
sulphur  in,  161. 
Alcan  on  wool  production,  474. 
Alcohol,  tax  on,  242. 

tax  too  high,  379. 
Alison  on  evils  of  society,  227. 
Allegations,  untrue,  378. 
Allspice,  378. 

tax  on,  318. 

Alternation  of  crops,  166,  203. 
Altoona,  road  completed  to,  461. 
America,  average  wheat  crop  of,  33. 
British  exports  to,  xxviii. 
early  protection,  50. 
in  future,  464. 

in  the  markets  of  the  world,  325. 
revolutionized,  188. 
subjected  to  England,  37. 
wages  in,  302. 
American  cloth,  235. 

commerce,  effect  of  Northern  Pa 
cific  on,  484. 
desert,  463,  467,  472. 
farmers,  discriminated  against,  359. 
finance,  185. 

flag,  import  of  coolies  under,  436. 
industry,  185. 

industries,  depression  of,  194. 
Institute,  417. 
iron  superior,  298. 
labor,  protection  to,  9. 
manufactures,  laws  against,  418. 
manufactures  to  be  discouraged,  38. 
muslin,  329. 
producers,  rights  of,  83. 
pumps,  329. 
steel  trade,  293. 
tonnage,  108. 
vessels,  430. 
•wages,  351. 
waste,  44. 
workmanship,  326. 
Americanize  the  South,  62. 
Amounts  levied  by  England,  361. 
Anchorages  of  Dominica,  442. 
Ancient  English  enactments,  25,  27. 
Anecdote  of  gold  room,  288. 

of Schenck,  354. 
Annexation  of  Texas,  433. 

495 


496 


INDEX. 


-Anthracite  coal,  91. 
Apostles  of  free  trade,  412. 
Appeal  of  Swift  to  the  Irish,  28. 
Apprentice  laws,  171. 
Approximate  product  of  wools,  474. 
Argument     for    free     coal    examined, 

309. 

Armies,  standing,  429. 
Articles  made  of  steel,  387. 

that  will  yield  revenue,  357. 
Asia,  wool  in,  473. 
Assertions  of  Wells,  290. 
Assumptions,  reasoning  from,  xx. 
Atkinson,  Edward,  vii,  viii,  xxvii. 
Atlanta,  174. 
Atlantic  Monthly  on  free  trade  revenue 

reform,  xix. 
Attack  in  Mobile,  172. 
Augusta,  174. 

Austin,  letter  of  Jefferson  to,  50. 
Australia,  sheep  in,  473. 
Austria,  iron  production,  301. 
Author,  early  views  of,  vi. 
Average  weekly  earnings,  271. 

weekly  expenditures,  272. 

wheat  crop  of  America,  33. 

wheat  crop  of  England,  33. 
Axes,  American,  327. 

Balances,  government,  139. 
Bankruptcy,  from  contraction,  210. 

inevitable,  112. 
Banks,  a  convenience,  392. 
Barley,  Canadian,  308. 
Baxter  on  national  income,  268. 
Bay  of  Samana,  441,  442,  444. 
Bayview  rolling  mills,  200. 
Beet  pulp  in  place  of  hay,  204. 

root  sugar,  472,  475. 

sugar,  203,  204,  205,  216. 
Beets  in  France,  204. 
Belgium,  activity  of,  198. 

contrasted  with  Ireland,  363. 

iron  production,  301. 

wages  in,  303. 

Belgians  make  English  books,  197. 
Benefits  from  Northern  Pacific,  464. 

of  free  labor,  275. 

of  war,  211. 

Berlin  rag  wool  manufactories.  45. 
Berries  of  northwest,  489. 
Berry,  L.  S.,  180. 
Bessemer  converter,  60. 

rails,  291,  386. 
Bill  for  duties  on  steel,  294. 
Birmingham  undersold,  327. 
Birney,  history  of  San  Domingo,  435. 
Bituminous  coal,  91,  94. 

coal  in  the  South,  93. 
Blackwood's  Magazine  on  British  pau 
perism,  xxx. 

on  the  new  power  introduced  into 
the  government  of  Great  Bri 
tain,  xvi. 


Blackwood's  Magazine  on  the  state,  the 

poor,  and  the  country,  xiv. 
Blair,  F.  P.,  on  the  republican  party,  57. 
Blankets  of  California,  67. 
Blastfurnaces,  new,  299. 
Blessings  from  suffering,  159. 

of  a  National  debt,  375. 
Bliss,  Orville  J.,  on  the   demands   of 

humanity,  xxi. 
Blockade,  430. 
Block  tin,  388. 

Blood  the  price  of  freedom,  149. 
Bolkenhain,  expenses  of  laborers  in,  340. 
Bonaparte,  Napoleon,  on  political  eco 
nomy,  xx. 
Bonaparte's  power,  secret  of,  45. 

protection,  46. 
Bondage  to  England,  73. 
Bonds,  exports  of,  x. 

held  abroad,  113,  133. 

held  at  home,  113. 
Boon  of  protection,  305. 
Borrowing  abroad,  142. 
Bouquet  from  Sherman,  479. 
Branch  railroads,  466,  468. 
Brass  in  the  West,  215. 
Brazil  (Indiana),  215. 
Bread  in  England,  186. 

in  Missouri,  186. 
Bribery,  320. 

Brick-yards  of  England,  338. 
Bricks  made  by  women  and  children, 

338. 

Bridge  over  the  Mississippi,  492. 
British  America,  trade  with,  85. 

colonies  and  coal,  305. 

colonies,  protection  in,  xxi,  xxii. 

cottons,  home  consumption,  411. 

exports  declining,  408. 

fabrics,  214. 

industry,  obstruction  to,  198. 

trade,  statistics  of,  xviii. 

trade  stationary,  xvii. 
Brougham  on  American  manufactures, 
103. 

on  United  States  industries,  41. 
Building  in  Washington,  1861,  258. 
Bureau  of  Statistics,  271. 
Burglars  turned  distillers,  241. 
Burwell  on  policy  of  South,  212. 

Wm.,  address  of,  192. 
Bushnell,  Rev.  Horace,  DD.,  on  protec 
tion,  285. 

protection  not  a  tax,  354^ 
Bylee  on  free  trade,  199. 
"Calf -hair  cloakings,"  39. 
Calhoun's  resolutions,  150. 
California  flannel,  68. 

sheep,  467. 

wants  currency,  396. 

wool,  67. 

Camden  and  Amboy  railroad,  459. 
Camphor,  378. 
j  Canada  favored  by  Wells,  305. 


INDEX. 


497 


Canada,  immigration  from,  98. 

requires  hard  coal,  91. 
Canadian  barley,  308. 

reciprocity  treaty,  53. 
Capital  can  care  for  itself,  322. 
coming  to  America,  389. 
in  Philadelphia,  423. 
wanted  in  the  South,  123. 
Care  of  the  committee  to  tariff,  381. 
Carey,  H.  C.,  letter  on  railroads,  468. 

on  the  Zollverein,  48. 
Carey,  H.  C.,  xxiii,  xxviii. 
Carlyle  on  figures,  91. 

contempt  of  labor  in  France,  42. 
Carrying  trade,  430. 
Cass,  Lewis,  on  acquisition,  440. 
Cassimeres  of  California,  68. 
Cast  iron  in  French  tariff,  373. 
Castor  oil,  377. 

Cattell,  A.  G.,  on  protection,  368. 
Cattle,  Texas,  189. 

in  West,  in  winter,  472. 
wanted  South,  182. 
Cause  of  America's  dependence,  485. 
of  no  demand  for  goods,  226, 
of  the  Mobile  outrage,  172. 
Causes  of  decrease  of  tonnage,  109. 
of  destitution,  183. 
of  Ireland's  miseries,  26. 
of  poverty  South,  165. 
of  prosperity  North,  165. 
Celebration,  Centennial,  415. 
Census  of  North  Carolina,  178. 
Centennial  celebration,  415. 
Chalk,  duty  on,  377. 
Changes  feared,  135. 

in  labor,  284. 

Chaptal  on  industry  of  France,  45. 
Charcoal  pig-iron  from  Marquette,  66. 
Charge  of  bribery,  320. 
Charges  against  Secretary  McCulloch, 

120. 

Chatsworth  (111.),  216. 
Cheap  bread,  186. 
coal,  91. 

commodities  from  protection,  325. 
food  for  labor,  31. 
food  for  slaves,  17. 
labor  not  suited  to  our  people  and 

country,  v. 

''  Cheap  and  nasty"  fabrics,  214. 
Cheapen  elements  of  life,  65. 
Cheapest  way  to  transport  grain,  362. 
Checking  the  export  of  specie,  112. 
Chemnitz,  wages  in,  348. 
Chevalier's  tariff  for  France,  42. 
Children  making  bricks,  338 
China  commerce,  485,  487. 
Chinese  immigration,  404. 
question,  letter  on,  403. 
wages,  405. 
Chloroform,  335,  379. 
Christian  equality,  62. 

32 


Cincinnati  shops  and  men,  352. 
Circular  on  iron,  358. 
Circulating  medium  in  South,  233. 
Cist,  Charles,  353. 
City  connected  by  railroads,  163. 

railroads,  163. 
Cities  contrasted,  147. 

of  the  South,  165. 
Citizenship  tested  by  color,  149. 
Cirilization,  muscles  of,  95. 
Classification  of  iron  not  new,  385. 
Clay  on  exhaustion  of  land,  36. 
Climate,  genial,  471. 

of  Montana,  477. 

of  Northwest,  488. 
Clocks,  215. 
Cloth,  American,  235. 
Cloves,  378. 
Coal  a  civilizer,  162. 

and  British  colonies,  316. 

and  iron,  power  of,  96. 

argument  for  free  provincial,  309. 

at  Evanston,  466. 

can  be  protected,  92. 

difference  in,  91. 

from  Puget  Sound,  483. 

importations  of,  94. 

in  Alabama,  160. 

in  Illinois,  70. 

in  the  South,  324. 

miners  of  Prussia,  348. 

Nova  Scotia,  313. 

of  Dominica,  442. 

of  Northwest,  488. 

of  the  West,  187,215. 

of  Virginia,  91. 

Pictou,  313. 

provincial,  imported,  312. 

provincial,  prices  of,  314. 

question,  402. 

representing  labor  power,  248. 

tax,  451. 

tax  on,  90. 
Coast  harbors,  Pacific,  486. 

range,  486. 
Coasting  trade,  regulation  of,  430. 
Cobden's  efforts  for  cheap  food,  196. 
Coffee,  378. 

of  San  Domingo,  434. 
tax,  318. 

oldest  part  of  the   Northern    Pacific* 
road,  471. 

oleman,  letter  of  Jackson  to,  51. 
ollodion,  335,  379. 
olonial  bondage  to  England,  73. 
olonies,  182. 

British,  and  coal,  305. 
olonists,  British  views  of,  305. 
olor  made  a  test,  149. 

not  a  test,  167. 
olurabia  railroad,  459. 

lumbus,  conduct  of,  435. 
olwell,  Stephen,  385. 


498 


INDEX. 


Comforts  cheapened,  163. 

Commerce,  American,  eflect  of  Northern 

Pacific  on,  484. 

domestic  better  than  foreign,  71. 
expanded,  43L 
iron  ships  for,  284. 
of  Pacific  Ocean,  485. 
of  Philadelphia,  494. 
of  United  States,  432. 
quickened,  382. 
restricted  by  taxes,  319. 
Commercial  advantages  of  the   North 

Pacific,  480. 
dependency,  213. 
importance  of  Cuba,  434. 
marine,  430. 

Commercially  dependent,  280. 
Commissioner  of  revenue,  report,  253. 
Commissioners  to  San  Domingo,  447. 
Commodities,  protection  cheapens,  325. 
Common  pleas,  suits  in,  270. 
Comparison  of  Pacific  routes,  465. 
of  years,  258. 
with  England,  267. 

Competition  challenged  by  Pennsylva 
nia,  59. 

Complaints  of  British  colonies,  306. 
Complexion  South,  179. 
Compositors  out  of  employ,  197. 
Compromise  no  longer,  156. 
Condition  of  America  at  the  outbreak 

of  the  rebellion,  214. 
of  America  at  close  of  the  war, 

214. 

of  English  miners,  95. 
of  poor  whites,  22. 
of  the  country  in  1861,  55. 
Confederate  manufactures,  232. 
Confederates,  conduct  of,  174. 
Confidence  destroyed,  229. 
Congress,  early  for  protection,  50. 

what  it  should  do,  72. 
Connecticut,  iron  in,  63. 
savings  banks,  263. 
Consideration  of  committee   on  tariff, 

381. 
Consumers,  additional,  248. 

in  Great  Britain  have  in  the  past 

made  the  laws,  xvi. 
Contempt  for  education,  179. 
Contest  for  independence,  399. 
Contract,  workmen  by,  407. 
Contraction   the   road   to   bankruptcy, 

210. 

will  bankrupt,  130. 
wrong,  393. 

Contrary  views  of  MeCullocti,  108. 
Contrast  of  American  and  English  la 
borers,  63. 

of  financial  history,  394. 
of  North  and  South,  147,  160. 
of  wages,  351. 
of  Wells  and  Sheffield,  294 


Conveniences  cheapened,  163. 

Coolies,  404,  436. 

Co-operative  system,  367. 

Copper  mines  closed  in  England,  200. 

mines  of  Peru,  410. 

West,  187. 
Corn  burned  for  fuel,  70. 

exported  by  the  South,  189. 

growing  South,  189. 

husks  for  paper,  69. 
Cost  increased  by  tax  on  alcohol,  335. 

of     collecting    internal     revenue, 
357. 

of  internal  revenue  system,  335. 

of  the  celebration,  424. 
Cotton  and  niggers,"  178. 
Cotton,  deep  plowing  and   phosphates 
with,  232. 

duty  should  be  on,  79. 

exchange  reports,  191. 

exhausting   the  soil,  36,  37,  166, 
176. 

factories  South,  316. 

free  in  England,  362. 

in  French  tariff,  373. 

is  King,  15. 

tax,  221. 

thread,  248. 

the  single  crop  South,  160. 

trade,  depression  of  British,  411. 
Country,  condition  of,  under  free  trade, 
xi. 

condition  of,  in  1861,  55. 

progress  of,  248. 

the  one  want  of,  13. 
Credit,  135. 

Creed,  H.  H.,  report  of,  198. 
Creed  of  republican  party,  157. 
Crises,  395. 

Crisis  of  1857,  free  trade,  vii. 
Crop  of  sweet  potatoes  South,  244. 

of  wheat  South,  244. 
Crops  alternated,  166,  203. 

increasing  in  Germany,  48. 

of  South,  191. 
Cuba,  434,  436. 

imports  from,  437,  439. 
Culture  denied  the  people,  152. 

of  beets,  203,  204. 

of  sheep,  473. 
Currency,  125,  126. 

curtailment  of,  124,  228. 

function  of,  137. 

not  in  excess,  228. 

redundant,  134. 

required,  134, 

value  of,  inexportable,  392. 

wanted  South,  275. 
Curtailment  of  currency,  124,  228. 
Customer,  best  of  England,  185. 
Customs  duties  a  tax  on  the  consumer, 

290. 
Cut  nails,  American,  327. 


INDEX. 


499 


Dakotah  climate,  471. 
Danville,  174,  180. 

(Pa.)  iron  works,  73. 
Davis,  Jefferson,  on  cost  of  Pacific  road, 

484, 

De  Bow  on  exhaustion  of  land,  36. 
Debt  being  paid,  449. 

debt,  national,  64. 

to  Europe,  393. 

war,  how  it  can  be  paid,  100. 
Debts  funded,  113. 

paid  without  money,  64. 
Decadence  of  England,  193,  400. 
Decay  from  slave  labor,  55. 
Decline  of  British  exports,  408. 

of  English  trade,  197. 
Deep  plowing,  232. 

plowing  for  beets,  203. 
Deer  Creek  valley,  472. 
Defects  of  present  tariff,  376. 
Defence  of  Pennsylvania,  323. 

of  Wells,  by  Garfield,  256. 
Degrading  mechanical  labor,  211. 
Delmar  on  statistics,  271. 
Demand  for  goods,  226. 

increasing  for  steel,  301. 
Democratic  policy,  212. 
Democrats,  false  position,  439. 

responsible  for  the  war,  152. 
Dependent,  commercially,  280. 

on  England,  185. 
Depositors  in  savings  banks,  260. 
Deposits  in  savings  banks,  258,  287. 
Depots  for  fuel,  440. 
Depression  of  American  industries,  194. 

of  British  cotton  trade,  411. 

of  trade  in  Great  Britain,  xiv. 
Desert,  American,  467,  472. 

great  American,  463. 
Desire  for  education,  179. 
Destiny  changed  by  slavery,  117. 
Destitution  in  Great  Britain,  xv. 
Destruction  by  taxation,  104. 

of  confidence,  229. 
Development  after  a  railroad,  466. 

in  Utah,  467. 

of  wool  trade,  467. 

South,  180. 

work  of,  489. 

Devotion  to  interests  of  England,  289. 
Difference  of   wages   in   England  and 

America,  302. 

Difficulties  in  iron  production,  301. 
Difficulty  of  improvement,  179. 
Dilke,  Chas.  W.,  xxii. 
Diminishing  imports,  274. 
Diminish  taxes,  223. 
Diminution  of  chemical  works,  242. 

of  taxes  required,  111,  223. 
Diplomacy  of  England  to  Portugal,  39. 
Direct  taxation,  334. 

tax  should  be  removed,  221. 

trade  with  the  West  Indies,  428. 
Discouraging  marriage,  255. 


Discoveries  of  South  during  the  war, 

232. 

Discovery  of  gold,  463. 
Discreditable  revenue  service,  239. 
Discrimination  against  American  far 
mers,  359. 

Disguised  slavery,  171. 
Disparity  between  gold  and  paper,  66. 
Dispensed  with,  how  internal  revenue 

can  be,  355. 

Distilled  spirits,  tax  on,  335. 
Distilleries  needed,  244. 
District  court,  suits  in,  270. 
Diversified  industry  North,  160. 
Diversify  industry  of  the  South,  315. 
Dixon  on  poor  whites,  23. 
Doane's  report  on  Montana,  476. 
Domestic    commerce    more    profitable 

than  foreign,  71. 
Dominica,  427. 

no  machinery  in,  439. 
Dominican  exports,  439. 
Double  taxes  and  diminish  income,  235. 
Downing's  bill,  13. 
Drawing  rations,  177. 
Drugs,  335. 

inferior,  242. 
Duluth,  480. 
Duty,  export,  on  cotton,  79. 

of  Congress,  72. 

of  freedmen,  168. 

on  chalk,  377. 

on  cloves,  378. 

on  pepper,  378. 

on  pig-iron,  296. 

on  putty,  377. 

on  sugar,  437. 
Duties  low,  immigration  falls  off,  369. 

not  always  a  tax,  325. 

not  average  40  per  cent,  378. 

of  citizenship,  169. 

on  Canadian  products,  308. 

on  competitive  commodities,  65. 

on  Cuban  products,  437,  439. 

on  steel,  294. 

on  wool  and  woolens,  374. 

protective,  not  a  tax,  354. 

repealed,  449. 

result  of  repealing,  365. 

to  be  increased,  290. 

to  be  repealed,  317. 

which  are  taxes,  318. 

which  need  readjustment,  379. 

Early  views  of  the  author,  vi. 
Earnings,  average  weekly,  271. 
Economical  relations  of  slavery,  16. 

enthusiasm,  xix. 
Economic  fallacies,  xix. 
Economy  recommended,  119. 
Edict  of*Nantes,  effect  of  revocation,  42. 
Educated  freedmen,  180. 
Education,  contempt  for,  179. 

North,  164. 


500 


INDEX. 


Education  of  slave  children,  167. 

the  test,  165. 

Effect  of  acquisition  of  Dominica  on 
slavery,  432. 

of  America  owning  Dominica,  435. 

of  closing  mines,  200. 

of  free  trade  on  poor  whites,  20 

of  machinery,  248. 

of  Northern  Pacific  on  American 
commerce,  484. 

of  Pacific  road  on  wool  trade,  467. 

of  protecting  nickel,  389. 

of  protection  on  prices,  358. 

of  repeal  of  coal  duty,  314. 

of  resumption,  131. 

Effects  of  the  Fort  Wayne  speech,  119. 
Efforts  for  Pennsylvania  Central,  460. 
Eight-hour  system,  278. 
Elevation  of  people,  248. 
Elgin  watches,  216. 
Elliot's  book,  15. 
Emigrants,  advice  to,  181. 

anxious  to  come,  236. 

rejected  South,  147. 

welcomed  North,  147. 
Emigration,  Earl  Granville  on,  xv. 

from  the  South,  153. 

Kirk  on,  79. 
Emma  mine,  467. 
Enactments  of  England  against  increase 

of  population,  25. 
Encourage  immigration,  201. 
Energy  wanted  West,  200. 
England  admits  cotton  free,  362. 

a  monopoly,  362. 

bondage  to,  73. 

buys  only  what  she  is  compelled 
to,  from  America,  186. 

by  free  trade,  subjects  America,  37. 

decadence  of,  193. 

dependence   upon  American   mar 
kets,  xxvii. 

does  not  practice  free  trade,  30. 

early  protection  in,  29. 

free  trade  in,  xiii. 

iron  production,  301. 

isolated    position    and   contracted 
limits  of,  xii. 

makes  shoddy,  43. 

manufacturing  power  of,  193. 

monopoly  in,  193. 

must  listen  to  the  demands  of  her 
people,  xvii. 

must  modify  her  views,  and  aban 
don  free  trade,  xvi,  xxi. 

only  free  trader,  409. 

paupers  of,  v. 

pig-iron  produced,  302. 

prohibits  imports,  29. 

requires  foreign  fuel,  59. 

steel  imported  from,  74. 

under  free  trade,  xi. 

wages  in,  302. 


England's  debts,  114. 

decadence,  400. 

diplomacy  to  Portugal,  39. 

export  of  rails,  276. 

inttfrests,  289. 

paupers  and  exports,  409. 

policy,  31,  196. 

sagacity,  218. 

supremacy,  how  established,  24. 

teachings,  194. 

treachery,  429. 

view   of    fiscal   policy   of    United 
States,  364. 

wheat  crop,  33. 
English  books  made  abroad,  197. 

goods  too  dear  for  them,  200. 

iron  circular,  358. 

labor,  restrictions  in  1406,  27. 

miners,  condition  of,  95. 

navy  aided,  195. 

pauperism,  193,  267 

repeal  of  protection,  29. 

sacrifices   to   destroy   competition, 
41. 

steam  ships,  subsidies  to,  30. 

tariff    against  American  farmers, 
359. 

tax  on  exportation  in  1337,  26. 

vagrants  in  1376,  26. 

wages,  406. 
Enriching  soil,  33. 
Enterprise  wanted  West,  200. 
Entertainment  in  New  Orleans,  173. 
Equality  as  Christian?,  62. 
Equity  and  morals  in  the  relations  of 

men,  xii. 

Error  of  the  South,  160. 
Essentials  of  life  not  to  be  taxed,  65. 
Establishments  of  Philadelphia,  423. 
European  laborers'  homes,  422. 
Evans  and  A  skin,  letter  of,  389. 
Evanston  coal  and  iron,  466. 

steel  works,  466. 
Evidences  of  plenty,  265. 
Evils  of  brick -yards  of  England,  338. 
Example  to  the  South,  62. 
Excessive  taxation,  102. 
Excess  of  currency,  228. 
Exchange  of  products,  382. 
Exhausted  soil,  176. 
Exhaustion  of  soil  South,  161. 

under  free  trade,  x,  xi,  xiii. 
Expand  commerce,  431. 
Expansion,  395. 

Expenditures,  average  weekly,  272. 
Experiences  of  the  author,  vi,  xii,  xxiii. 
Experiments  of  McDonald,  232. 
Explanation,  personal,  320. 
Export  duty  on  cotton,  79. 

gun-barrels,  66. 

of  rails  by  England,  276. 

of  specie,  to  be  checked,  112. 

of  sugar,  275. 


INDEX. 


501 


Exports,  185. 

decline  of  British.  408. 

from  the  United  Kingdom,  213. 

of  Dominica,  439. 

of  gold  and  silver,  132. 

and  paupers,  409. 
Exposition,  Hewitt's  report  on,  300. 

International,  415. 
Expositions  of  England,  416. 
Extent  of  our  support  of  slavery,  438. 

Factories,  confederate,  232. 

shoddy,  45. 

Factory  wages  in  Silesia,  346. 
Failure  of  free  trade,  409. 
Fallacies  of  revenue  report,  273. 

of  Wells,  286. 

Fallacy  of  Wells'  statement,  230. 
False  conclusions   of   revenue  report, 
253. 

position  of  Democrats,  439. 
Fare  on  railroads,  148. 
Farmers  and  manufacturers,  mutual  de 
pendence  of,  xxviii. 

dependence  of,  upon  a  diversified 
industry,  xxiii,  xxiv. 

enriched,  166. 

impoverished  by  free  trade,  32. 

markets,  xix. 

of  America,  discrimination  against, 
359. 

need  protection,  322. 
Fault  of  existing  tariff,  379. 
Federal  debt  funded,  113. 
Feeding  of  slaves,  54. 
Females  employed  in  Philadelphia,  423. 
Fertility  of  Montana,  477. 
Fiber  from  corn  husks,  69. 
Field  on  hardware,  327. 
Field's  report  on  hardware.  330. 
Figures  arranged  to  suit,  256. 
Finances,  American,  185. 
Financial  derangement,  225. 

history  contrasted,  394. 

revulsions,  395. 
Fire  is  force,  284. 
Firth  and  Son,  letter  of,  310. 
Fiscal  policy  of  United  States,  364. 
Flannel  of  California,  68. 
Flax,  377. 

Fleece  and  the  loom,  121. 
Flock  paper  hangings,  44. 
Flour  in  the  South,  189. 
Food  for  slaves,  cheap,  17. 

of  laborers  in  Europe,  339. 

raised  by  South,  232. 
Foreign  labor  employed  by  American 
capital,  106. 

market,  188. 

markets,     decreased      dependence 
upon,  under  protection,  xxvii. 

merchandise  imported,  274. 

merchandise  undervalued,  111. 


Foreign  sugar,  203. 

tonnage,  109. 

Foreigners  make  English  books,  197. 
Forests  of  Northwest,  488. 
Former  debts  of  America,  113. 
Forney  on  Philadelphia.  164. 
Function  of  currency,  137. 
France  injured  by  loss  of  labor,  42. 

iron  production,  301. 

protects  industry,  42. 
Franklin  Institute,  417. 
Frauds,  379. 

by  omission,  257. 

in  invoicing,  39. 

in  steel,  384. 

in  whiskey,  240. 

of  Sheffield  steel-makers,  293. 

on  Portugal,  39. 

Free  colored,  deprived  of  suffrage,  149. 
Freedrnen  can  work  iron  mills,  316. 

a  help,  281. 

become  land  holders,  247. 

duty  of,  168. 

intelligence  of,  167. 

skilled  laborers,  169. 
Freedmen's  schools,  174,  179. 
Freedom,  price  of,  149. 

to  work,  168. 

Works,  291. 

Free  labor,  results  of,  275. 
'list,  purpose  of,  373. 

press,  156. 

provincial  coal,  argument  for,  309. 

spirits,  357. 
Free  trade  apostles,  412. 

a  specific,  366. 

Byles  on,  199. 

condition  of  the  country  under,  x, 
xi,  xiii. 

early  belief  of  the  author  in,  vi. 

effect  on  poor  whites,  20. 

exhausts  and  impoverishes,  32. 

experiences,  x. 

French,  371. 

in  England  on  the  defensive,  xviii, 
xix. 

in  1861,  55. 

in  men,  371. 

limits  grain  market,  336 

means  low  wages,  336. 

not  practised  by  England,  30. 

real,  xxiv. 

results  of,  18,  197,  280. 

ruin  under,  vii,  x. 

sophisms,  199. 

subjects  America  to  England,  37. 

why  demanded  by  the  South,  15. 
French  beet  culture,  204. 

free  trade,  371. 

industry,  Chaptal  on,  45. 

prevention  of  waste,  44. 

protection,  Hayes  on,  46. 

tariff  against  American  farmers,  359. 


502 


INDEX. 


Fruits  of  Northwest,  488. 

of  Utah,  472. 
Fuoa,  straits  of,  487. 
Fuel,  corn  burned  for,  70. 

depots,  440. 

foreign,  required  by  England,  59. 

in  Virginia,  59. 

tax  on,  310. 

Funding  Federal  debts,  113. 
Furnaces  erecting  for  pig-iron,  277. 

iron,  of  Lake  Superior,  67. 

new  blast,  299. 
Future  growth  of  sugar,  475. 

of  America,  464. 

of  Milwaukee,  201. 

of  New  Orleans,  157. 

of  North  Carolina,  117. 

of  the  South,  134. 

of  the  West,  215. 

Pacific  metropolis,  481. 

Gardens  of  freedmen,  181. 
Garfield,  defence  of  Wells,  256. 
Garsed,  R.,  manufactures  of,  248. 
Gas  tips,  387. 

Gee,  on  American  manufactures,  38. 
Generosity  of  Wells  296. 
Genial  climate,  471. 
Gentile  development,  467, 
Germany,  benefit  of  protection,  48. 

and  France,  effects  of  war  between, 
on  trade,  xviii. 

subsistence  in,  338. 

•wages  in,  338. 
Gilmore  on  poor  whites,  22. 
Gin  room,  316. 
Glogau,    expenses,    etc.,    of    laborers, 

344. 

Gluten  from  corn  husks,  69. 
God,  the  guide  in  all,  156. 
God's  providence,  149. 
Gold  advancing,  229. 

discovery,  463. 

exports,  132. 

large  exports  of,  x. 

not  a  regulator,  235. 

of  Australia  and  California,  vi. 

of  Utah,  467. 

premium,  136,  449. 

price  of,  135. 

South,  176. 
Goldberg,   expenses,   etc.,  of  laborers, 

341. 

Goods,  protection  cheapens,  76,  386. 
Gordon,  execution  of,  437. 
Gorlitz,  expenses,  etc.,  of  laborers,  343. 
Government  balances,  139. 

income,  450. 

producing  panics,  141. 
Grades  of  Northern  Pacific,  484. 

of  wool,  474. 
Grain,  how  transported  cheapest,  362. 

in  bulk,  243, 


Grain,  market  limited  by  free  trade,  336. 

only  for  distillers,  251. 

prices  in  Philadelphia,  365. 

reports,  Southern,  191. 

too  many  producers,  xxix. 

without  a  market,  335. 
Grand  army  of  the  republic,  467- 
Grant,  Daniel,  on  home  politics,  25. 

on  expositions,  416. 

on  free  trade,  409. 

E.  B.,  on  beet  sugar,  205. 
Grant's  administration  contrasted,  449. 
Granville,  Earl,  on  the  destitution   in 
the  United  Kingdom,  and  on  emigra 
tion,  xv. 
Grapes,  175. 
Grass  of  the  West,  469. 
Great  American  desert,  463. 

Britain,  new  power  in  the  govern 
ment  of,  xvi. 

Britain,  pauperism  in,  xiv. 
Greenbacks,  125. 

depreciating,  229. 
Gregg  on  poor  whites,  21. 
Greifenberg,  expenses,  etc.,  of  laborers, 

342. 

Griffin,  John,  letter  on  wages,  351. 
Griswold,   statistics  of  savings  banks, 

263. 
Growth  of  Philadelphia,  202. 

of  railroad  traffic,  468. 
Guidance  of  God,  156. 
Gums,  378. 

Hagerman,  J.  J.,  letter  of,  202. 
Hall,  Rev.  Newman,  186. 
Hammond  on  exhaustion  of  land,  36. 

on  poor  whites,  21. 
Handicraftsmen  and  capitalists,  198. 
Harbors  of  Dominica,  442. 

Pacific  coast,  486. 
Hardware,  American,  326. 

in  Birmingham,  from  abroad,  330. 
Harmony  of  interests,  xxiii. 
Harris,  of  N.  C.,  180. 
Harvest,  seasons  of,  South,  232. 
Hats  from  rye  straw,  160. 
Hayes'  "  Fleece  and  the  Loom,"  121. 
Hayes  on  French  protection,  46. 
Hay,  beet  pulp  a  substitute,  204. 
Hayti,  441,  442,  444. 
Heat  of  Dominica,  444. 
Henry,  on  fertilizing  matter,  34. 
Hernando,  Miss,  176. 
Hewitt,  report  on  wages,  303. 

report  on  exposition,  300. 
Hirsohberg,  expenses,  etc.,  of  laborers, 

341. 

Hispaniola,  434. 
History  of  Pacific  railroad,  456. 

of  shoddy,  43. 
Hoes,  American,  327. 
Hogan,  John,  on  Dominica,  443. 


IXDEX. 


503 


Home,  172. 

Home  consumption  of  British  cottons 

411. 

Home-made  steel,  291. 
Home  markets,  71,  364. 

monopolies,  121. 

politics,  25. 
Homes  of  European  laborers,  422. 

of  Philadelphia,  184. 

of  workmen,  421. 
Homestead  law,  169,  366. 
Honey,  176. 

Hops,  dutiable  in  France,  43. 
Horse-shoe  nails,  American,  327. 
Hostility  to  Chinese,  404. 
Houses  owned  by  laborers,  164. 
Hoyle  on  English  pauperism,  267. 

on  internal  taxes,  103. 
Hume,  on  the  effects  of  revocation  of 

Edict  of  Nantes,  42. 
Humphreys,    Gen.    A.  A.,    report    of, 
483. 

Idaho  climate,  471. 
Idle  iron  works,   74 
Idle  ship-yards,  322. 
Idleness,  168,  273. 

result  of  taxes,  221. 
Ignorance,  176. 

a  cause  of  the  war,  152. 

of  whites,  178. 
Illinois  coal,  187. 

iron,  187. 

Illustration  of  power,  248. 
Immigrants,  248. 

most  desirable,  xxv. 
Immigration,  advantages  of,  xxvi. 

drawn  to  Pennsylvania,  163. 

from  Canada,  98. 

increased  by    building    railroads, 
491. 

invited,  71. 

not  welcome  South,  153. 

report  on,  491. 

statistics,  370. 

stimulated  by  protection,  369. 

to  be  encouraged,  201. 
Importance  of  iron,  96. 

of  the  centennial  celebration,  416. 
Importation  of  coal,  94. 
Import  of  coolies,  436. 

of  slaves,  436. 

skilled  workmen,  371. 
Imports,  185. 

diminishing,  274. 

from  Cuba,  437,  439. 

from  West  Indies,  431. 

large,  under  protection,  xxvi. 

of  Philadelphia,  423. 

of  provincial  coal,  312. 

prohibited  by  England,  29. 
Impracticable  schemes,  142. 
Improvement  in  gun  barrels,  66. 


Improvements  during  the  war,  214. 

since  the  war,  66. 
Income,  national,  268. 

not  fallen  off,  230. 

of  government,  450. 
Incongruities  of  tariff,  377. 
Increased  yield  of  cotton,  233. 
Increase  ocean  commerce,  441. 

of  demand  for  steel,  301. 

of  deposits  in  savings  banks,  261. 

of  iron  furnaces,  299. 

of  paupers  in  England,  410. 

of  pig-iron  in  Pennsylvania,  276. 

of  population,  274. 

of  railroad  tonnage,  468. 

of  wealth,  274. 

the  duties,  290 
Indiana  coal,  187. 
Indian  cotton,  80. 
India,  wrongs  of,  363. 
Inducements  to  laborers,  61. 
Industrial  works  of  Philadelphia,  424. 
Industries,  depression  of  American,  194. 
Industry,  American,  185. 

a  kind  of  property,  45. 

obstruction  to  British,  198. 

of  France,  Chaptal  on,  45. 

of  freedmen,  181. 

of  Portugal  injured  by  England,  40. 

of  the  South,  diversified,  315.; 

protected  by  France,  42. 

revolutionized,  188. 
Inexportivble  currency,  value  of,  392. 
Infants  making  bricks,  338. 
Inferior  drugs.  242. 
Influence  of  expositions,  416. 
Ingenuity  wanted  South,  182. 
Injurious  taxes,  319. 
Injury  from  internal  taxes,  106. 
Inquisitorial  taxes,  319. 
Insurance,  statistics  of  life,  265. 
Intelligence  denied  the  people,  152. 

of  freedmen,  167. 
Interest  excessive,  229. 

of  Philadelphia    in  the   Northern 
Pacific,  491. 

rates  of,  in  England  and  the  United 
States,  xiii. 

reduced,  449. 

requires  development  of  the  South. 

182. 

Interests  of  Pennsylvania,  323. 
Internal  revenue,  239. 

revenue,   how    can    be    dispensed 
with,  356. 

revenue  system,  333. 
Internal  taxes  against  iron,  73. 

taxes  injurious,  103. 

taxes  repealed,  449. 
[nternationul  exposition,  415. 
[ntolerance  of  the  Soutn,  155. 
invoicing,  frauds  in,  39. 
Iowa,  491. 


504 


INDEX. 


Iowa  coal,  187. 

Ireland  contrasted  with  Belgium,  363. 

desolated  by  England,  362. 
Ireland's  miseries,  causes  of,  26. 
Irish,  appeal  of  Swift  to,  28. 

patriot,  letter  from,  367. 
Iron  age,  prices,  358. 
Tron  Age,  views  of  the,  107. 

a  civilizer,  162. 

and  coal,  power  of,  96. 

and  steel  are  muscles,  284. 

at  Evanston,  466. 

classification  not  new,  385. 

importance  of,  96. 

in  Alabama,  160. 

in  French  tariff,  373. 

interest  of  the  West,  202. 

making  in  the  West,  360. 

of  Lake  Superior,  215. 

of  Northwest,  488. 

of  the  West,  187. 

ore,  Lake  Superior,  66. 

no  personal  interest  in,  320. 

produced  South,  315. 

production,  difficulties,  301. 

production  of  the  world,  300. 

purchased  from  England,  73. 

ships,  284. 

works  idle,  74. 

works,  Milwaukee,  202. 

works  of  Connecticut,  63. 

works  of  Pennsylvania,  73. 

workers'  wages,  303,  407. 
Irrigation,  472. 
Issues  at  present,  399. 
Italy,  iron  production,  301. 

Jackson,  Gen.,  letter  to  Coleman,  51. 

on  protection,  49. 
Japan,  commerce,  457,  485. 
Jay,  Washington's  instructions  to,  427. 
Jefferson,  letter  to  Austin,  50. 

on  causes  of  revolution,  417. 

on  protection,  49,  50. 
Journeymen  in  Silesia,  348. 
Junction  railway,  421. 
Justice,  the  republican  law,  158. 

Kansas  coal,  187. 

Kansas-Nebraska  movement,  54. 

Kaolin  in  Virginia,  59. 

Kemble,    Mrs.,   to     the    Wissahickon, 

420. 

Kent,  manure  in,  44. 
Kingsley,  Bishop,  on  emigration,  236. 
Kirk,  Prof.,  on  protective  duties,  79. 
on  the  pauperism  in  Great  Britain 

and  Ireland,  xxix. 
social  politics,  196. 
Klippart,  on  Ohio  wheat,  35. 
Knives,  best  from  America,  32fi. 
Koopmansehap,  system  of,  404. 
Krupp's  steel  works,  49. 


Labor,  changes  in,  284. 

Chinese,  403. 

driven  from  France,  42. 

former  restrictions  on  English,  27, 

freedmen  skilled  in,  169. 

necessary,  14. 

power  of  a  man,  248. 

protection  to  American,  9 

raising  in  Virginia,  58. 

taxes  that  burden,  319. 

wages  for  American,  351. 

Utopias,  xix. 
"  Laborer"    substituted    for    "  negro," 

180. 
Laborers  enriched,  166. 

own  their  houses,  164. 

to  be  protected,  273. 

wanted  by  Pennsylvania,  61. 
Lake  Superior  iron  ore,  66. 
Lambert,  Rev.  Brooke,  on  severance  of 

rich  and  poor,  xiv. 
Lamborn,  l3r.,  on  pig-metal,  60. 
La  Motte  mine,  388. 
Landeshut,  expenses  of  laborers,  340. 
Land  exhausted  by  cotton,  36,  37. 

exhausted  by  free  trade,  32. 

owners  drawing  rations,  177. 
Lands  enriched  in  Philadelphia,  163. 

owned  by  freedmen,  247. 

relative  value,  148. 
Largest  steel  works,  49. 
Latham,  Dr.,  letter  to,  475. 
Laws  against  American  manufactures. 
418. 

in  favor  of  England,  73. 
Lead  of  Utah,  467. 

Lee,  Dr.  D.,  on  cotton  culture,  36,  37. 
Legal-tender  currency,  126. 
Lehigh  county,  slate  from,  59. 
Leignitz,   expenses,    etc.,  of    laborers, 

344. 

Lessons  of  the  war  in  the  South,  232. 
Letter  from  an  Irish  patriot,  367. 

of  Evans  &  Askin,  389. 

of  Firth  &  Son,  310. 

of  H.  C.  Carey  on  railroads,  468. 

of  Jackson  to  Coleman,  51. 

of  Jefferson  to  Austin,  50. 

of  Pierce  to  the  South,  151. 

of  Washington  to  Morris,  427. 

on  Chinese  question,  403. 

to  Dr.  Latham,  475. 

to  operatives,  278. 
Levees,  how  built,  170. 
Libe,  John  C.,  letter  to,  403. 
Liberality  of  the  South,  168. 
Life  insurance  statistics,  265. 
Limestone  in  Alabama,  160. 

West,  187. 

Lincoln  to  be  revered,  157. 
Linseed  oil,  377. 

List  of  articles  replaced   in    Birming 
ham  by  foreign  makers,  330. 


IXDEX. 


505 


Locke,  quotation  from,  14. 

Locomotives,  Prussian,  199. 

London  Quarterly  Review  on  economic 

fallacies  and  labor  Utopia?,  xix. 
Longworth's  grape  vines,  175. 
Losses  to  America,  43. 
Lowenberg,  expenses,  etc.,  of  laborers, 

342. 
Low  wages,  257. 

wages  under  free  trade,  336. 
Loyal  states,  wealth,  114. 
Lumpkin,  Hon.  T.  H.,  on  poor  whites, 

21. 
Luxuries  taxed,  318. 

Machinery,  182. 

for  muscle,  179. 

used  by  Americans,  326. 

wanted  in  Dominica,  439. 
Machinists  wanted  South,  181. 
"  Madness"  of  a  Pacific  railroad,  459. 
Madness  of  the  South,  80. 
Maimed  soldiers  on  public  lands,  467. 
Males  employed  in  Philadelphia,  423. 
Man  cannot  compromise  principles,  51. 

developed  in  the  North,  165. 

must  be  respected  in  the  South,  62. 

repressed  South,  165. 
Mankind,  168. 
Manufactories,  182. 

of  silk,  197. 

Manufacture  of  shoddy,  43. 
Manufactures  and  agriculture,  mutually 
dependent,  112. 

a  source  of  power,  31. 

in  America,  early  discouraged  by 
England,  38. 

of  Philadelphia,  423. 

of  R.  Garsed,  248. 
Manufacturers'  tax  should  be  removed, 

107. 

Manufacturing  power  of  England,  193. 
Manure  from  refuse,  43. 

required  South,  161,  182. 
Marine,  commercial,  430. 
Market,  a  home,  364. 

no  foreign,  188. 
Markets  fur  agricultural  produce,  vii,  ix. 

for  mutton,  473. 

not  glutted,  224. 

of  the  world,  America  in,  325. 

should  be  near,  70. 
Marriage  for  operatives,  255. 
Marquette  district,  360. 

iron  ore,  66,  215. 

region,  ore  of,  60. 

Massachusetts'  savings-banks,  289. 
Material,  raw,  not  exported  by  France, 

42. 

Maturing  of  crops,  191. 
McClellan  on  Dominica,  441. 
McCulloch's  Fort  Wayne  speech,  119. 

report,  101. 


McDonald's  experiments,  232. 
Meat  not  under  free  trade,  337. 

once  a  week,  366. 
Melada,  434. 

Memphis,  reception  in,  173. 
Men,  free  trade  in,  371. 

wanted,  13. 
Metals  of  Illinois,  70. 
Methuen's  treaty  with  Portugal,  40. 
Metropolis  of  the  Pacific,  481. 
Michigan  blast  furnaces,  74. 
Mild  winters,  488. 
Military  necessary  South,  180. 
Militia  for  war,  430. 
Mill,  J.  S.,  xix,  xx. 

J.  S.,  the  London    Quarterly  Re 
view  on,  xix. 
Mills,  California  woolen,  67. 

for  steel,  292. 
Milwaukee,  address  at,  185. 

future  of,  201. 

iron  works,  202. 
Mineral  wealth  oC  the  South,  175. 

wealth  of  the  West,  187. 

wealth  of  Virginia,  57. 
Minerals  in  Alabama,  160. 

in  the  South,  182,  315. 

of  Dominica,  444. 

of  the  Northwest,  488. 
Miners,  English,  become  paupers,  201. 

from  Pennsylvania,  323. 
Mines  closed  in  England,  200. 

in  Utah,  467. 

of  national  wealth,  119. 
Minnesota  climate,  471. 

population,  470. 

resources,  471, 

wheat,  470. 

Miseries  of  Ireland,  causes  of,  26. 
Mississippi  river  a  national  highway, 

170. 
Missouri  blast  furnaces,  74. 

coal,  187. 

Mobile,  attacked  in,  172. 
Molasses,  434. 

in  the  West,  216. 

whiskey,  242. 

Moneys,  pay  debts  without,  64. 
Monopoly,  England  a,  362. 

of  England,  193. 
Montana,  476. 

climate,  471. 

Montgomery,  address  at,  159. 
Morals  and  equity  in  the  relations  of 

men,  xii. 
Mormon  empire,  455. 

irrigation,  472. 

Morrell,  Hon.  D.  J.,  contrast  of  Ameri 
can  and  English  laborers,  63. 
Morrill  on  cotton  tax,  221. 

tariff,  304. 

tariff  of  1861,  prosperity  under   x. 

tariff  on  pig-iron,  356. 


506 


INDEX. 


Morris,  G.,  letter  of  Washington  to,  427. 

Mountain  sheep,  479. 

Mud  volcano,  479. 

Munitions  not  to  be  obtained,  214. 

Murchison,  Sir  R.,  on  closure  of  mines, 

200. 

Muriate  of  potassa,  383. 
Muscle  supplanted  by  machinery,  179. 
Muscles,  iron  and  steel,  284. 

of  civilization,  95. 
Muslin,  American,  329. 
Mutton,  markets  for,  473. 

Nails,  American,  327. 
National  banks,  125. 

debt,  64. 

debt  not  a  blessing,  375. 

importance  of  the  celebration,  417. 

income,  268. 
Nationality,  North,  147. 
Native  productions,  214. 
Natural  pathway  for  Northern  Pacific, 

484. 

Natural  wealth  South,  160. 
Navigation  act  of  England,  13. 

steam,  441. 

Navy,  English,  aided,  195. 
Necessities   caused   home  productions, 

215. 
Necessity  a  teacher,  232. 

of  diminishing  taxes,  111. 

of  protection,  328. 

of  railroads,  78. 
Need  for  immigrants,  237. 

of  the  South,  315. 
Negro  intelligence,  167. 
"  Negro,"  substituted  by  "  laborer,"  180. 

"worshipper,"  181. 
New  Northwest,  454,  470. 
New  Orleans,  address  at,  146. 

future  of,  157. 

Newspapers  prohibited  South,  155. 
New  York  and  Philadelphia,  422. 

bloom  iron,  74. 

opposition  to  Pacific  railroad,  458. 

savings-banks,  263. 
Nickel,  388. 
Niell,  address  of,  397. 
"  Niggers  and  cotton,"  178. 
Nimrno's  report  on  commerce,  431. 
Nitrate  of  soda,  383. 
Nomination  for  Congress,  397. 
North  Carolina,  175. 

census  of,  178. 

future  of,  117. 

not  able  to  bear  taxation,  117. 

water-power  of,  118. 
Northern  Pacific  railroad,  454,  464. 

river  system,  481. 
Northwest,  forests  of,  488. 

fruits,  etc.,  488. 

minerals  of,  488, 

oats  of,  488, 


Northwest,  population  for,  490. 

the  new,  451,  470. 

wheat  of,  488. 
Notes  of  national  banks,  126. 
Nova  Scotia  coal,  313. 
Nutmegs,  378. 

Oats  of  Northwest,  488. 

Object  of  reciprocity  treaty,  87,  306. 

Objections  to  Chinese,  405. 

to  internal  revenue.  334. 

to  revenue  report,  253. 

to  route  of  Pacific  road,  466. 
Obstruction  to  British  industry,  198. 
Ocean  commerce,  increase  of,  441. 
Odious   method  of  collecting  revenue, 

250. 

Officers  of  first  meeting  for  Pacific  rail 
road,  457. 
Ohio,  decrease  of  wheat  crop,  35. 

rolling  mills,  74. 
Olympia,  489. 

temperature  of,  471. 
Omaha,  463. 
Operatives,  letter  to,  278. 

too  poor  to  marry,  255. 
Opinions,  early,  of  the  author,  vi,  xii. 
Opposition  to  annexation,  433. 

to  Pacific  railroad,  458. 
Order  of  Secretary  of  Navy,  282. 
Oregon,  488. 

city,  455. 

improvements  in,  68. 

Steam  Navigation  Co.,  481. 
Ore  of  the  Marquette  i-egion,  60. 

smelted  abroad,  467. 
Orissa,  starvation  in,  363. 
Ornaments,  slate,  59. 
Outrage  in  Mobile,. 172. 
Over  production  impossible,  225. 

Pacific  coast  harbors,  486. 

metropolis,  481. 

ocean  commerce,  485. 

railroad,  247. 

railroad  history,  456. 

routes  compared,  465. 
Palm  oil,  388. 

Pampas  of  South  America,  473. 
Panics  produced  by  government,  141. 
Panic  years,  257. 
Paper  from  corn  husks,  69. 

from  wood,  69. 
Paper-hangings,  flock,  44. 

mills,  wages  in,  406. 

trade,  197. 

Park  of  Philadelphia,  420. 
Patterson  on  English  pauperism,  200. 
Pauperism  in  England,  193. 

in  Great  Britain,  xiv.,  xv. 

in    Great    Britain    and     Ireland, 

xxix. 
Paupers  of  England,  v. 


INDEX. 


507 


Paupers  an<l  txports,  409. 

of  England  increased,  201. 
of  United  Kingdom,  267,  269. 
weekly  increasing,  410. 
Paved  streets  in  Philadelphia,  164. 
Pay  debts  without  moneys,  64. 
Paying  the  debt,  449. 
Peat,  200. 

Pennsylvania  central,  459,  494. 
challenges  competition,  59. 
interests,  323. 
iron  works,  73. 
pig-iron,  276. 
proud  of,  322. 
wants  laborers,  61. 
Wells'  dislike  to,  310. 
wheat,  160,188. 
Peons  of  Peru,  410. 
People  elevated,  248. 

of  prairies  need  protection,  68. 
Pepper,  duty  on,  378. 

tax,  318. 
Perfumery,  335. 
Personal  explanation,  320. 

knowledge   of   buyer    and    seller 

416. 

liberty,  149. 
Peru  copper  mines,  410. 
Philadelphia,  address  at,  171. 
accommodations,  420. 
and  New  York,  422. 
commeice,  494. 
enrichment  of,  163. 
growth  of,  202. 
homes,  184,  421. 
house-owners,  164. 
how  built  up,  162. 
imports,  423. 
industrial  works,  424. 
interest  in  Northern  Pacific,  491. 
meeting  for  Pacific  railroad,  458. 
park,  420. 

prices  of  grain,  365. 
products,  423. 
statistics,  423. 
steel  works,  208. 
why  the  place  for  the  celebration, 

419. 

Phosphates,  232. 
Pictou  coal,  313. 
Pierce's  letter  to  the  South,  lot. 
Pig-iron,  276,  296. 

furnaces,  erecting,  277. 
price  of,  358. 
produced,  302. 
production,  355. 
protection  to,  355. 
statistics  of,  60. 
Pines  at  a  great  altitude,  478. 
Place  to  hold  the  celebration,  419. 
Planter's  resolutions  in  South  Carolina, 

27. 
Plenty,  year  of,  260. 


Ploughs,  subsoil,  182. 
Policies,  life  insurance,  265. 
Policy  of  the  Democratic  leaders,  212. 
of  England,  31,  196. 
of  protection,  82. 
to  crowd  out  our  works,  386. 
Political  economy,  David  Syme  on,  xi, 

xviii. 

failure  of,  xxi. 
method  of,  xi,  xviii. 
Napoleon  Bonaparte  on,  xx. 
theories  of,  vii,  viii,  ix,  x,  xi. 
unrealized  predictions  of,  viii. 
Political   economists,   decline   in   their 

influence,  xvii. 
status  of  the  South,  123. 
Pollock,  Hon.  James,  458.  • 
Poor,  H.  V.,  on  railroads,  468. 
man's  court,  269. 
the,  Mr.  Bliss  on,  xx,  xxi. 
whites,  177. 

whites,  effect  of  free  trade  on,  20. 
whites  induced  to  labor,  83. 
Poplins,  silk,  387. 

Population,  excess  of,  in  England,  xii. 
for  the  Northwest,  490. 
increasing,  274. 
of  Dominica,  435. 
of  Minnesota,  470. 
Porcelain  gas  tips,  387. 
Porter's  "  Progress  of  the  Nation,"  30. 
Portugal,  39,  40. 

Position,  false,  of  democrats,  439. 
Poverty,  D.   A.  Wells  regards,  a  bles 
sing,  273. 

of  the  South,  116,165. 
Power  of  coal  and  iron,  96. 

secret  of  Bonaparte's,  45. 
Practicability    of    eight-hour    system. 

279. 

Prairies,  protection  for  people  of,  68. 
Prediction  fulfilled,  364. 

relative  to  Milwaukee,  201. 
Predictions,  historical,  219. 

in  1850,  461. 
Precious  metals  of  Northwest,  488. 
'reference  for  greenbacks,  126. 
^remium  on  gold,  136. 
'resent  law,  revise  the,  380. 

tariff,  defects  of,  376. 
ress  to  be  free,  156. 
restige  of  the  war,  158. 
rice  of  freedom,  149. 
of  gold,  135. 

of  gold  not  a  regulator,  235, 
of  pig-iron,  358. 
of  steel,  291. 
rices  affected,  395. 

effect  of  protection  on,  358. 

how  regulated,  136. 

of  grain  in  Philadelphia,  365, 

of  provincial  coal,  314, 

of  steel  rails,  386. 


508 


INDEX. 


Pride  of  caste,  1 1 5. 

Principles,  not  to  be  compromised,  51. 
Producers    in    Great    Britain    will    in 
future  make  the  laws,  xvii. 

rights  of  American,  83. 
Production  below  the  wants,  225. 

of  iron  in  the  world,  300. 

of  pig-iron,  302,  355. 
Productions  of  Northwest,  487. 
Productive    power   increase   of,  under 

protection,  xxvi,  xxvii. 
Products,  exchange  of,  382. 

of  Dominica,  444. 

of  Philadelphia,  423. 

of  San  Domingo,  434. 
Progress  of  Marquette  district,  360. 

of  the  country,  248. 

Prohibition  of  imports  by  England,  29. 
Proof  that  protection  cheapens  goods, 

386. 
Property  acquired  by  freedmen,  181. 

industry  as,  45. 

Proportion  of  English  paupers,  201. 
Proposals  of  D.  A.  Wells,  307. 
Proposition  to  borrow  abroad,  142. 

of  Commissioner  Wells,  217. 
Prosperity  at  close  of  the  war,  227. 

Edward   Atkinson    on,    American, 
xxvii. 

evidences  of,  265. 

great  American,  xxvii,  xxviii. 

insured  by  protection,  130. 

North,  165. 

of  freedmen,  181. 

since  Morrill  tariff  of  1861,  x. 
Protection  benefits  all  the  States,  57. 

Bonaparte  on,  45. 

Bonaparte's  method,  46. 

Bushnell,  Rev.  Dr.,  on,  285. 

cheapens  commodities,  325. 

cheapens  goods,  76,  386. 

defends  wages,  407. 

demanded  by  people,  367. 

early,  in  America,  50. 

effect  on  prices,  358. 

for  coal,  92. 

for  laborers,  273. 

for  the  good  of  the  farmer,  xxx. 

for  the  sake  of  the  laborers,  63. 

French,  42. 

immigration  under,  xxv. 

in  England  in  1660,  29. 

in  Germany,  48. 

insures  prosperity,  130. 

needed  by  all,  322. 

of  wages,  xxx. 

repealed  by  England,  29. 

stimulates  immigration,  369. 

to  American  labor,  9. 

to  English  labor,  29. 

to  steel,  291. 

what  it  has  done  for  England,  194. 

will  pay  our  debt,  65. 


Protective  duties  not  a  tax,  354. 

tariff,  results  of,  281. 
Proud  of  Pennsylvania,  322. 
Providence  of  God,  149. 
Provincial  coal  inarched,  312. 

prices  of,  314  * 
Prussia  iron  production,  301. 

prevents  waste,  45. 

wages  in,  348. 
Prussian  locomotives,  199. 
Prussiate  of  potash  from  refuse,  43. 
Publishers  employ  foreign  labor,  106. 
Puget  Sound  450,  482,  483,  486,  488. 

climate  of,  471. 
Pumps,  American,  329. 
Purpose  of  free  list,  373. 
Purposes  of  duty  on  pig-iron,  297. 
Putty,  duty  on,  377. 

Quackery  of  free  trade,  366. 
Quarter  of  a  century,  462. 
Question,  Chinese,  letter  on,  403. 
Quinine,  379. 
Quinine  affected  by  spirit  tax,  335. 

Rag-wool  in  England,  45. 

in  Prussia,  45. 
Rags,  English  duty  on,  45. 

not  exported  by  France,  44. 

woolen,  44. 
Railroad  built  by  South,  232. 

Northern  Pacific,  454,  464. 

Pacific,  456. 

tonnage,  increase,  468. 

traffic,  468,  469. 
Railroads,  459. 

a  necessity,  78. 

at  outbreak  of  the  war,  214. 

contrasted,  148. 

H.  V.  Poor  on,  468. 

in  United  States,  301. 
Rails  exported  by  England,  276. 

for  United  States  from  England. 
276. 

of  steel,  206,  291. 

prices  of,  386. 

Randall,  Josiah,  resolutions  of,  458. 
Rationale  of  Kansas-Nebraska   move 
ment,  54. 

Rations  for  the  poor,  177. 
Raw  material  not  exported  by  France, 

42. 

Raynolds*  explorations,  472. 
Realized  riches,  229. 
Rebellion  revolutionized  America,  188. 
Reception  in  Memphis,  173. 

in  New  Orleans,  173. 
Reciprocity  treaty,  53,  87,  306. 
Red  river,  481. 
Reduce  taxes,  how  to,  375. 
Reducing  interest,  449. 
Reduction  of  taxes  necessary,  450. 

of  whisky  tax,  245. 


INDEX. 


509 


lie-form,  revenue,  448. 
Reformers,  revenue,  286. 
Refuse  worked  into  shoddy,  43. 
Regeneration  of  the  South,  183. 
Register  of  American  vessels,  430. 
Rehabilitation  of  States,  122. 
Relation  between  gold  and  currency, 

135. 

Relations  of  slavery,  16. 
Remedies  for  tariff  defects,  376. 
Remove  direct  taxes,  221. 
Repealing  duties,  result  of,  365. 
Repeal  needless  taxes,  230. 

of  protection  by  England,  29. 

of  reciprocity  treaty,  306. 

of  what  taxes,  317. 
Reply  to  Mr.  Voorhees,  9. 
Report  of  D.  A.  Wells,  253. 

of  Secretary  of  Treasury,  101. 

on  commerce,  431. 

on  immigration,  491. 

on  revenue,  253. 

to  Congress  on  a  route  for  Pacific 

road,  459. 

Reports  of  cotton  exchange,  191. 
Republican  creed,  157. 

party,  170. 

Repugnance  to  views  of  Calhoun,  150. 
Requirements  of  the  South,  182. 
Resolution  of  Yancey,  151. 
Resolutions  of  Calhoun,  150. 

of  South  Carolina  planters,  27. 
Resources,  undeveloped  of  the  United 
States,  xii,  xiii. 

of  Alabama,  161. 

of  Minnesota,  471. 

of  Northwest,  487. 

of  South,  146,231. 

Southern,  189. 
Responsibility   of  the   United   States, 

437. 

Restrictions  on  English  labor  in  1406, 
27. 

to  commerce,  319. 
Results  of  contracted  currency,  222. 

of  duty  on  pig-iron,  298,  356. 

of  firing  on  Sumter,  151. 

of  free  labor,  275. 

of  free  trade,  18,  197,  280. 

of  internal  taxation,  106. 

of  lack  of  currency  in  South,  234. 

of  Morrill  tariff,  304. 

of  non-protection,  52. 

of  protection,  281. 

of  repealing  duties,  365. 

of  repeal  of  reciprocity  treaty,  306. 

of  the  war,  56,  214. 

of  whisky  frauds,  242. 
Resumption,  effect  of,  131. 

not  approaching,  230. 
Revenue,  false  conclusions  on,  253. 

from  steel,  67. 

from  wool,  104. 


Revenue,  internal,  239. 

reform,  448. 

reformers,  286. 

report,  absurdities  of,  273. 

report  on,  253. 

service,  discreditable,  239. 

system,  abolish  the  internal,  450. 

system,  internal,  333. 

Wells  on,  216. 
Revise  the  present  law,  380. 
Revival  of  ship  building,  431. 
Revolution  in  American  industry,  188. 
Revulsions,  financial,  395. 
Rewarding  labor,  14. 
Rich  and  poor,  Rev.  Brooke  Lambert 

on  severance  of,  xiv. 
Riches,  realized,  229. 
Rights  of  American  producers,  83. 

secured,  158. 

Road  completed  to  Altoona,  461. 
Robertson,  John  B.,  report  on  Southern 
resources,  189. 

on  wheat  culture,  244. 
Rolling  mills  in  South,  315. 

mills  of  Ohio,  74. 

mills  of  Pennsylvania,  73. 
Room  for  immigrants,  237. 
Routes,  Pacific,  compared,  465. 
Ruskin  on  mining  population,  95. 
Russell  &  Erwin,  works  of,  63. 
Russia,  iron  production  in,  301. 
Rye  straw  in  New  England,  160. 

Sagacity  of  England,  218. 
Salt,  285. 

tax,  451. 

Lake  City,  455. 
Saltpetre,  378. 

as  an  illustration,  382. 
Samana  bay,  441,  442,  444, 
San  Domingo  coffee,  434. 

products,  434, 
San  Francisco,  462,  482. 
Savings  bank,  an  index,  222. 
Savings  banks,  deposits  in,  258,  287. 

banks,  increase  in  deposits,  261. 

banks  of  Connecticut,  263. 

banks  of  New  York,  263. 

banks  of  Vermont,  263. 
Savings  of  laborers  in  Europe,  339. 
Saws,  American,  326. 
Saxony,  wages  in,  348. 
Scenery  of  Montana,  476. 
Schedule  of  duties  on  steel,  294. 
Scheme  to  build  a  railroad,  458. 

to  settle  public  lands,  467. 
Schenck,  Gen.,  anecdote  of,  354. 
Scholars  among  freedmen,  180. 
School  for  freedmen,  174. 
Schools  an  inducement  to  laborers,  61. 

attract  immigrants,  153. 

for  freedmen,  179. 

North,  164. 


510 


INDEX. 


Schools  to  be  encouraged,  156. 
Schonau,expenses,  etc.,  of  laborers,  341. 
Schroeder  on  beet  sugar,  203. 
Scott,  Thos.  A.,  494. 
Seasons  of  Northwest,  487. 
Secretary  of  Navy,  order  of,  282. 
Secret  of  Bonaparte's  power,  45. 
Sections  contrasted,  147. 
Sectionalism  South,  147. 
Sentiments  of  republicans,  170. 

on  which  rest  our  government,  149. 
Settlements  along  North  Pacific,  480. 
Seven  j'ears  crises,  395. 
Sheep  culture,  473. 

in  California,  467. 

mountain,  479. 
Sheffield  crowded  out,  326. 

frauds,  379. 

steel  makers,  293. 
Sheriff's  sales  in  Philadelphia,  268. 
Sherman,  468. 

Ship  builders  out  of  employ,  198. 
Ship  building  in  Northwest,  490. 

building  reviving,  431. 
stimulation  of,  431. 
Ship  yards  idle,  322. 
Shipping  interest,  382. 

improvement  in  American,  vi. 
Shoddy,  42,  43. 

towns,  45. 

Shoes  manufactured  South,  232. 
Shrinkage  in  values,  221. 
Silesia,  factory  wages,  346. 

wages  and  living  in,  340. 
Silk,  frauds  in,  379. 

in  Coventry  and  Macclesfield,  410. 

manufactories,  197. 

poplins,  387. 

protected  by  England,  29. 
Silver  exports,  132. 

in  Utah,  467. 
Simms,  James,  180. 
Skilled  laborers  South,  316. 
Skilled  nickel  makers,  389. 
Skilled  workmen,  371. 
Slate  ornaments,  59. 
Slave-trade,  Carey  on,  48. 

products,  438. 
Slaves,  cheap  food  for,  17. 

educated,  180. 

fed  by  the  farmers,  54. 

still  imported,  436. 

Slavery  affected  by  acquisition  of  Do 
minica,  432. 

degrades  all,  52. 

disguised,  171. 

economical  relations  of,  16. 

supported  by  United  States,  434. 
Smelting  ore  abroad,  467. 
Smuggling  stopped,  306. 
Social  condition  of  poor  whites,  22. 
Soil  enriched  in  England,  33. 

exhausted,  176. 


Soil  exhausted  by  cotton,  36,  37,  166. 

improved  by  beets,  203. 

of  Dominica,  436. 

of  the  South,  165. 

sterile  in  New  England,  160. 
Soldiers  for  public  lands,  467. 

shoddy  goods,  214. 
Soliciting  subscriptions  for  Pennsylva 
nia  Central,  460. 
Solvency  of  National  banks,  127. 
Sophisms  of  free  trade,  199. 
Sophistry,  256. 

of  revenue  report,  253. 
South,  agriculture  of,  188. 

as  viewed  by  themselves,  36. 

coal  in  the,  93,  324. 

diversify  industry  of,  315. 

exports  corn,  189. 

future  of,  134. 

growing  wheat,  189. 

liberality  of,  168. 

minerals  of,  315. 

mineral  wealth  of,  178. 

must  respect  labor,  62. 

natural  wealth  of,  160. 

need  of,  315. 

needs  currency  392. 

needs  protection,  57. 

opposed  immigration,  153. 

poverty  of,  116. 

raised  its  own  food,  232. 

resources  and  wants,  146. 

resources  of,  231. 

rich,  275. 

rolling  mills  in,  315. 

suggestions  to,  62. 

wants  capital,  123. 

wants  currency,  275. 

wants  machinists,  181. 

wealth  of,  62. 

why  they  demanded  free  trade  15. 
Southern  cities,  165. 

flour,  189. 

intolerance,  155. 

plowing,  176. 

resources,  189 

views  of  reciprocity  treaty,  307. 

views  of  the  South,  36. 

views  on  debt,  116. 

views  on  lack  of  currency,  234. 
Spain,  iron  production,  301. 
Spanish  rule,  435. 
Specie,  check  export  of,  112. 

payments,  132,  229,  393. 
Specific  duties,  379. 

free  trade  a,  366. 
Speculation  stimulated,  130. 
Speech  on  Northern   Pacific,  in  1866, 
465. 

on  Altoona  road,  461. 
Spices,  tax  on,  379. 
Spires'  gold  sales,  288. 
Spirit  of  the  South,  168,  180. 


INDEX. 


511 


Spirits  free,  357. 

tax,  451. 

tax  on  distilled,  335. 
Staffordshire,  wages  in,  303. 
Stamps,  revenue  from,  357. 
Standing  armies,  429. 
Starvation  in  Ireland,  363. 
Starving  in  the  midst  of  abundance, 

176. 

State  rights,  170. 
States,  wealth  of,  114. 
Statistics,  bureau  of,  271. 

of  D.  A.  Wells,  271. 

of  Delmar,  271. 

of  Dr.  Lamborn,  60. 

of  immigration,  370. 

of  life  insurance,  265. 

of  New  York  savings-banks,  263. 
Steam  engines,  182. 

in  Philadelphia,  423. 

navigation,  441. 
Steamers,  American,  supplanted  under 

free  trade,  vii. 

Steamships,  English  subsidies  to,  30. 
Steel  ad  valorem,  383. 

age  of,  approaching,  95. 

American,  60. 

and  iron  are  muscles,  284. 

demand  for  increasing,  301. 

duties  on,  294. 

frauds  in,  293,  379. 

from  abroad,  in  1861,  215. 

imported  from  England,  74. 

in  1860,  67. 

in  1864,  67. 

makers  of  Sheffield,  293. 

must  be  made  at  home,  284. 

now  produced  at  home,  215. 

price  of,  291. 

protection  to,  291. 

rails,  206. 

works,  291. 

works  in  Philadelphia,  208. 

works,  in  the  West,  466. 
Stevens  Gov.,  on  Puget  Sound,  487. 
Stimulate  shipping  interest,  382. 
Storr's  school,  174. 
Straits  of  Fuca,  487. 
Straw,  rye,  in  New  England,  160. 
Strikes,  261. 

among  laborers,  260. 
Subscriptions  for  Pennsylvania  Central, 

460. 

Subsidies  to  English  steamships,  30. 
Subsistence  of  European  laborers,  337. 
Subsoil  ploughs,  182. 
Substitute  for  hay,  204. 
Sub-treasury,  139. 

Success  of  Pennsylvania  Central,  494. 
Suffering  brings  blessings,  159. 
Suffrage  taken  from  free  colored  men, 

149. 
Sugar,  203,  434. 


Sugar,  beet  root,  472,  475. 

duty  on,  437. 

exported,  275. 

from  Cuba,  436. 

in  France,  204. 

in  French  tariff,  372. 

in  future,  475. 

in  the  West,  216. 
Suggestion  to  the  South,  62. 
Suits  in  various  years,  269. 
Sullivan,  Sir  Edw.,  xv. 

on  free  trade,  378. 

on  French  free  trade,  45. 

on  wages,  406. 
Sulphur  in  Alabama,  161. 

springs  of  Montana,  478. 
Summer  trade  wanted,  190. 
Superiority  of  American  goods,  326,, 

of  American  iron,  298. 

of  Southern  flour,  189. 
Support  of  slavery  by  United   States, 

438. 

Suppression    of    manufactures    caused 
the  American  revolution,  417. 

of  truth,  256. 

Supremacy  of    England,    how    estab 
lished,  24. 

Sweden,  iron  production,  301. 
Swift's  appeal  to  the  Irish,  28. 
Swift,  Mayor,  457. 

Swineford  on  Marquette  district,  360. 
Syme,    David,   on   political    economy, 

xi,  xviii. 
System,  eight-hour,  278. 

of  Northern  rivers,  481. 

Talc,  387. 

Tariff,  defects  of  present,  376. 

of  1824  and  1828,  77. 

of  1842,  77. 

of  1842,  repeal  of,  vi. 

of  1846,  advantageous  circum 
stances  under  which  it  was  tried, 
vi. 

of  1846,  bankruptcy  under,  vii. 

of  1846,  enactment  of,  vi. 

of  France,  Chevalier's,  42. 

incongruities,  377. 

Morrill,  304. 

present,  (1871,)  highly  protective, 
xxvi. 

why  necessary,  328. 
Tariffs   abroad  against  American   far 
mers,  359. 

of  United  States,  390. 
Tarver  on  poor  whites  of  South,  20. 
Taxation  can  it  be  borne,  218. 

direct,  334. 
Tax  on  alcohol,  379. 

on  allspice,  318. 

on  coal,  90. 

on  coffee,  318. 

on  cotton,  221. 


512 


INDEX. 


Tax  on  fuel,  310. 

on  pepper,  318. 

on  spices,  379. 

on  spirits,  repeal  of,  243. 

on  tea,  318. 

on  whisky,  245. 
Taxes,  first  to  be  repealed,  451. 

imposed  by  law,  448. 

injurious,  319. 

made  odious,  250. 

on  watches,  etc.,  249. 

on  woolens,  104. 

repealed,  449. 

restricting  commerce,  319. 

should  not  be  oppressive,  65. 

that  burden  labor,  319. 

to  be  retained,  451. 

way  to  reduce,  375. 

what,  should  be  repealed,  317. 

year  of  light,  260. 
Tax-payers  do  not  want  the  debt  paid, 

107. 
Tea,  378. 

carried  on  Pacific  road,  462. 

tax  on,  318. 

Teachings  of  England,  194. 
Temperature  of  Dominica,  444. 

of  West,  471. 

Temper  of  the  South,  180. 
Temptations  of  whisky  tax,  245. 

to  revenue  officers,  240. 
Tendency  of  society,  227. 
Tenement  houses,  421. 
Tennessee  talc,  387. 
Territorial  unity,  149. 
Territories  for  sheep,  473. 
Texas,  annexation,  433. 

cattle,  189. 

Theory  of  D.  A.  Wells,  287. 
Thomasville  (N.  C.),  232. 
Thread  manufactured,  248. 
Thrift  of  freedmen,  181. 
Tillage,  shoddy  waste  as,  43. 
Time  on  railroads,  148. 
Tin,  388. 

mines  closed  in  England,  200. 

West,  187. 
Tobacco,  434. 

in  French  tariff,  372. 

should  be  taxed,  357. 

tax,  451. 

Toil  relieved,  284. 
Tolerance  counselled,  156. 
Tonnage,  American,  108. 

demand  for,  431. 

foreign,  109. 

of  railroads  increase,  468. 
Trade,  summer,  wanted,  190. 

with  British  America,  85. 

with  tropical  countries,  429. 

with  West  Indies,  431. 
Traffic  for  railroad,  466. 

railroad,  468,  46.9, 


Treachery  of  England,  429. 
Treaty   of   commerce   between   France 
and  Germany,  408. 

of  Methuen  with  Portugal,  40. 

reciprocity,  87. 
Tribute  rings,  435. 
Tripartite  alliance,  88. 
Trip-hammer,  163. 
Tropical  countries,  trade  with,  429. 
Truman  on  poor  whites,  22. 
Truth  suppressed,  256. 
Tweeds  of  California,  68. 

Umbrellas  made  abroad,  106. 
Undervaluation  of  foreign  merchandise, 

111. 

Union  demanded,  157. 
United  Kingdom,  paupers  of,  267. 
United  States,  boundless  and  undevel 
oped  resources  of,  xii,  xiii. 

commerce,  432. 

fiscal  policy  of,  364. 

not  ready  for  the  war  in  1861,  55. 

pig-iron  produced  in,  302. 

railroads  in,  301. 

rails  from  England  for,  276. 

still  support  slavery,  434. 

support  of  slavery,  438. 

tariffs,  390. 

Unjust  penalties,  250,  251. 
Unmarried  operatives,  255. 
Utah  silver  mines,  467. 

Vagrant  laws,  171. 

Valley  of  Deer  Creek,  472. 

Value  of  inexportable  currency,  392. 

of  lands  trebled  in  South,  232. 
Values,  shrinkage  in,  221. 
Varnish  gums,  378. 
Vegetables  of  the  South,  176. 
Vermont  savings-banks,  263. 
Victoria,  city  of,  306. 
Views  of  the  Iron  Age,  107. 

Southern,  on  debt,  116. 
Vines,  175. 
Virginia,  a  labor  raiser,  58. 

coal,  91. 

fuel  in,  59. 

kaolin  in,  59. 

wealth  of,  57. 
Volcano  of  Montana,  479. 
Voorhees,  Mr.,  reply  to,  9. 
Voters,  all  who  were  free,  148. 

Wages,  182,  280. 

average  weekly,  271,  272. 
Chinese,  405. 

defended  by  protection,  407. 
difference  in  England  and  America, 

302. 

English,  406. 
in  paper  mills.  406. 
in  Prussia.  34S. 


INDEX. 


513 


Wages  in  Saxony,  348 

in  Silesia,  346. 

in  woolen  mills,  406. 

low  from  free  trade,  336. 

of  American  labor,  351. 

of  European  laborers,  337. 

of  iron-workers,  407. 

of  laborers  in  Germany,  340. 

paid  in  Philadelphia,  423. 

protection  of,  xxx. 

Sullivan  on,  406. 
Walker,  Judge,  174. 

Robert  J.,  vii. 
Want  of  our  country,  13. 
Wants  from  aboad,  382. 

of  the  South,  146. 
War  a  developer,  211. 

caused  by  ignorance,  152. 

caused  by  the  democrats,  152. 

debt,  how  it  can  be  paid,  100. 

energy  of  South,  232. 

iron  ships  for,  284. 

made  inevitable,  149. 

not  an  unmitigated  evil,  210. 

prestige  of  the,  158. 

results  of,  56. 

waste  of,  286. 

Warren,  Lieut.  G.  K.,  report  of,  482. 
Washington  on  protection,  49,  285. 

territory,  488. 

territory  climate,  471. 
Washington's     instructions     to     Jay, 
427. 

letter  to  G.  Morris,  427. 
Waste  land  of  Northwest,  488. 

of  war,  286. 

prevented  in  France,  44. 
Watches,  216,  318. 
Water  for  British  soldiers  supplied  by 

Americans,  329. 
Water-power,  178,  182. 

in  Philadelphia,  423. 

of  North  Carolina,  118. 

of  Wetumpka,  166. 
Way  to  reduce  taxes,  375. 
Wealth  increasing,  274. 

increasing  since  the  war,  216. 

of  loyal  States,  114. 

of  the  South,  62,  160,  165,  175. 

of  Virginia,  57. 
Weavers  in  Germany,  340. 
»Veekly  earnings,  average,  271. 

expenditures,  average,  272. 
Welcome  all,  156,  404. 
Wells,  D.  A.,  absurdities  of,  256,  288, 
vii,  xvii,  xxvii. 

favors  Canada,  305. 

on  exemption  from  taxes,  105. 

on  immigration,  370. 

on  pig-iron,  296. 

on  statistics,  271. 
Wells'  dislike  to  Pennsylvania,  310. 

fallacies,  286. 

33 


Wells'  generosity,  296. 

report,  284. 

report  on  revenue,  216. 

sophistry,  253. 
West  fed  the  South,  188. 

India  trade,  431. 

Indies,  direct  trade,  428. 

iron  interest  of,  202. 

iron  making  in,  360. 

needs  currency,  392. 

to  raise  sugar,  203. 
Western  coal,  215. 

productions,  215. 
Whalebone   admitted   free   by  France, 

43. 
Wheat  bought  by  England,  186. 

crop,  average,  of  America,  33. 

crop  of  England,  33. 

crop  South,  244. 

growers  without  a  market,  337. 

growing  South,  189. 

late  in  Pennsylvania,  160. 

of  Minnesota,  470. 

of  Northwest,  488. 

of  Pennsylvania,  188. 

of  West  unused,  243. 

raised  in  England,  186. 
Whisky  in  bond,  364. 

ring,  240. 

tax  on,  335. 
White,  when  the  word  was  first  inserted 

in  a  law,  148. 

Whites  indifferent  to  education,  179. 
Whitney,  Asa,  456. 
Wild-cat  country,  463. 
Williams,  W.,  report  of,  198. 
Winter  unknown,  471. 
Winters,  severe,  471. 
Wisconsin,  491. 

interested,  188. 

iron,  187. 

Wissahickon,  the,  420. 
Women  drawing  the  plow,  176. 

making  bricks,  338. 
Wood  of  Dominica,  442.  I 

paper  pulp  from,  69. 
Wool,  472. 

clip  of  1868,  473. 

clip  of  1880,  474. 

duties  on,  374. 

English  tariff  on,  29. 

of  California,  67. 

revenue  from,  104. 

tariff,  388. 

tax,  222. 

trade  development  of,  467. 
Woolen  mills,  wages  in,  406. 

rags  wasted  in  America,  44. 
Woolens,  duties  on,  374. 
Work  for  Philadelphia,  492. 

of  development,  489. 
Workmen  idle,  257. 

without  work,  197. 


514 


INDEX. 


Workmen's  homes,  421. 
Workshops  of  Cincinnati,  352. 
Works  of  Philadelphia,  162. 
World's  hazaar,  416. 

production  of  iron,  300. 
Worthless  materials  worked  up, 
Wrongs  of  India,  363. 


43. 


Yale    College,    the     politico-economic 

fallacies  taught  there,  xx. 
Yancey's  resolution,  151. 


Yarrinton's  pamphlet,  1677,  12. 
Year  of  plenty,  260. 
Years  of  depression,  257. 
Yellowstone  explorations,  472,  477. 
Yield  of  cotton  increased,  233. 
Young,  Edward,  report  of,  406. 
Yucatan,  occupation  of,  440,  441. 

Zinc  in  the  West,  215. 
Zoll-Verein,  advantages  of  to  Germany, 
48. 


CATALOGUE 

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PRACTICAL  AND  SCIENTIFIC  BOOKS, 

PUBLISHED  BY 

HENRY    CAREY    BAIRD, 

INDUSTRIAL   PUBLISHER, 

ISTo-   4O6    "W  A  L IST  TJ  T    STIR.EET, 
PHILADKLPHIA. 


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HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 


pRAIK.—  THE    PRACTICAL   AMERICAN    MILLWRIGHT   AND 
^     MILLER. 

Comprising  the  Elementary  Principles  of  Mechanics,  Me 
chanism,  and  Motive  Power,  Hydraulics  and  Hydraulic 
Motors,  Mill-dams,  Saw  Mills,  Grist  Mills,  the  Oat  Meal  Mill, 
the  Barley  Mill,  Wool  Carding,  and  Cloth  Fulling  and  Dress 
ing,  Wind  Mills,  Steam  Power,  &c.  By  DAVID  CRAIK,  Mill 
wright.  Illustrated  by  numerous  wood  engravings,  and  five 
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pAMPIN.—  A  PRACTICAL  TREATISE  ON  MECHANICAL   EN- 

U     GINEEEING: 

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of  Steam-engines,  etc.  etc.  With  an  Appendix  on  the  Ana 
lysis  of  Iron  and  Iron  Ores.  By  FRANCIS  CAMPIN,  C.  E.  To 
which  are  added,  Observations  on  the  Construction  of  Steam 
Boilers,  and  Remarks  upon  Furnaces  used  for  Smoke  Preven 
tion;  with  a  Chapter  on  Explosions.  By  R.  Armstrong,  C.  E., 
and  John  Bourne.  Rules  for  Calculating  the  Change  Wheels 
for  Screws  on  a  Turning  Lathe,  and  for  a  Wheel-cutting 
Machine.  By  J.  LA  NICCA.  Management  of  Steel,  including 
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Expansion.  And  the  Case-hardening  of  Iron.  By  G.  EDE. 
8vo.  Illustrated  with  29  plates  and  100  wood  engravings. 

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.—  THE  PRACTICE  OF  HAND-TURNING  IN  WOOD, 

IVORY,  SHELL,  ETC.; 

With  Instructions  for  Turning  such  works  in  Metal  as  may  be 
required  in  the  Practice  of  Turning  Wood,  Ivory,  etc.  Also 
an  Appendix  on  Ornamental  Turning.  By  FRANCIS  CAMPIN  , 
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PAPRON  DE  DOLE,—  DUSSATJCE.—  BLTJES  AND  CARMINES  OF 

V     INDIGO, 

A  Practical  Treatise  on  the  Fabrication  of  every  Commercial 
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Translated,  with  important  additions,  by  Professor  H.  Dus- 
SAUCE.  12mo. 


HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 


plREY.—  THE  WOKKS  OF  HENRY  C.  CAKEY: 

CONTRACTION  OR  EXPANSION?  REPUDIATION  OR  RE 
SUMPTION?  Letters  to  Hon.  Hugh  McCulloch.  8vo.  38 

FINANCIAL  CRISES,  their  Causes  and  Effects.     8vo.  paper 

25 

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and  Commercial.     8vo.,  paper  .         .-       .       ,,         .     $1  00 

Do.  do.  cloth          .         .         .     $1  50 

LETTERS  TO  THE  PRESIDENT  OF  THE  UNITED  STATES. 
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MANUAL  OF  SOCIAL  SCIENCE.  Condensed  from  Carey's 
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MONEY:  A  LECTURE  before  the  N.  Y.  Geographical  and  Sta 
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PRINCIPLES  OF  SOCIAL  SCIENCE.     3  volumes  8vo.,  cloth 

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REVIEW  OF  THE  DECADE  1857—  '67.     8vo.,  paper  50 

RECONSTRUCTION:  INDUSTRIAL,  FINANCIAL,  AND  PO 
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paper  .  .  "  .  '  .  .  .  .  .  50 

THE  PUBLIC  DEBT,  LOCAL  AND  NATIONAL.  How  to 
provide  for  its  discharge  while  lessening  the  burden  of  Taxa 
tion.  Letter  to  David  A.  Wells,  Esq.,  U.  S.  Revenue  Commis 
sion.  8vo.,  paper  .......  25 

THE  RESOURCES  OF  THE  UNION.  A  Lecture  read,  Dec. 
1865,  before  the  American  Geographical  and  Statistical  So 
ciety,  N.  Y.,  and  before  the  American  Association  for  the  Ad 
vancement  of  Social  Science,  Boston  .  .  *  •  50 

THE  SLAVE  TRADE,  DOMESTIC  AND  FOREIGN;  Why  it 
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HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 


LETTERS    ON    INTERNATIONAL    COPYRIGHT.      (1867.) 
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REVIEW  OF  THE  FARMERS' QUESTION.  (1870.)  Paper  25 

RESUMPTION!  HOW  IT  MAY  PROFITABLY  BE  BROUGHT 
AROUT.     (1869.)     8vo.,  paper         ....  50 

REVIEW  OF  THE  REPORT  OF  HON.  D.  A.  WELLS,  Special 
Commissioner  of  the  Revenue.     (1809.)     8vo.,  paper  50 

SHALL  WE  HAVE  PEACE  ?    Peace  Financial  and  Peace  Poli 
tical.    Letters  to  the  President  Elect.    (1868.)    8vo.,  paper  50 

THE   FINANCE   MINISTER  AND  THE    CURRENCY,  AND 
THE  PUBLIC  DEBT.     (1868.)     8vo.,  paper    .         .  50 

THE  WAY  TO  OUTDO  ENGLAND  WITHOUT   FIGHTING 
HER.    Letters  to  Hon.  Schuyler  Colfax.  (1865.)  8vo.,  paper 

$1  00 

WEALTH!  OF  WHAT  DOES  IT  CONSIST  ?    (1870.)   Paper  25 

QAMTJS.— A  TREATISE  ON  THE  TEETH  OF  WHEELS : 

Demonstrating  the  best  forms  which  can  be  given  to  them  for  the 
purposes  of  Machinery,  such  as  Mill-work  and  Clock-work.  Trans 
lated  from  the  French  of  M.  CAMUS.  By  JOHN  I.  HAWKINS. 
Illustrated  by  40  plates.  8vo $3  00 

QOXE.— MINING  LEGISLATION. 

A  paper  read  before  the  Am.  Social  Science  Association.  By 
ECKLEY  B.  COXE.  Paper 20 

nOLBTJRN.—  THE  GAS-WORKS  OF  LONDON: 

Comprising  a  sketch  of  the  Gas-works  of  the  city,  Process  of 
Manufacture,  Quantity  Produced,  Cost,  Profit,  etc.  By  ZERAII 
COLBURN.  8vo.,  cloth 75 

pOLBTJRN.— THE  LOCOMOTIVE  ENGINE: 

Including  a  Description  of  its  Structure,  Rules  for  Estimat 
ing  its  Capabilities,  and  Practical  Observations  on  its  Construc 
tion  and  Management.  By  ZERAH  GOLBUEN.  Illustrated.  A 
new  edition.  12mo.  .  ,  .  .  .  .  $1  25 

nOLBTJRN  AND  MAW.— THE  WATER-WORKS  OF  LONDON : 
Together  with  a  Series  of  Articles  on  various  other  Water 
works.     By  ZERAH  COLBURN  and  W.  MAW.     Reprinted  from 
"  Engineering."     In  one  volume,  8vo.        .     •  .     $4  00 

TVA.GUERREOTYPIST  AND  PHOTOGRAPHER'S  COMPANION: 
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10  HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 

TjIRCKS.— PERPETUAL  MOTION : 

Or  Search  for  Self-Motive  Power  during  the  17th,  18th,  and 
19th  centuries.  Illustrated  from  various  authentic  sources  in 
Papers,  Essays,  Letters,  Paragraphs,  and  numerous  Patent 
Specifications,  with  an  Introductory  Essay  by  HENRY  DIRCKS, 
C.  E.  Illustrated  by  numerous  engravings  of  machines. 
12mo.,  cloth §3  50 

•niXON.— THE  PRACTICAL  MILLWRIGHT'S  AND  ENGINEER'S 
U     GUIDE : 

Or  Tables  for  Finding  the  Diameter  and  Power  of  Cogwheels  ; 
Diameter,  Weight,  and  Power  of  Shafts ;  Diameter  and  Strength 
of  Bolts,  etc.  etc.  By  THOMAS  DIXON.  12mo.,  cloth.  $1  50 

TJUNCAN.— PRACTICAL  SURVEYOR'S  GUIDE: 

Containing  the  necessary  information  to  make  any  person,  of 
common  capacity,  a  finished  land  surveyor  without  the  aid  of 
a  teacher.  By  ANDREW  DUNCAN.  Illustrated.  12mo.,  cloth. 

$1  25 

TYffSSAUCE.— A  NEW  AND    COMPLETE   TREATISE    ON  THE 
U    ARTS  OF  TANNING,  CURRYING,  AND  LEATHER  DRESS- 
ING: 

Comprising  all  the  Discoveries  and  Improvements  made  in 
France,  Great  Britain,  and  the  United  States.  Edited  from 
Notes  and  Documents  of  Messrs.  Sallerou,  Grouvelle,  Duval, 
Dessables,  Labarraque,  Payen,  Rene',  De  Fontenelle,  Mala- 
peyre,  etc.  etc.  By  Prof.  H.  DUSSATJCE,  Chemist.  Illustrated 

by  212  wood  engravings.     8vo $10  00 

TjUSSAUCE— A  GENERAL  TREATISE  ON  THE  MANUFACTURE 
U    OF  SOAP,  THEORETICAL  AND  PRACTICAL : 

Comprising  the  Chemistry  of  the  Art,  a  Description  of  all  the  Raw 
Materials  and  their  Uses.  Directions  for  the  Establishment  of  a 
Soap  Factory,  with  the  necessary  Apparatus,  Instructions  in  the 
Manufacture  of  every  variety  of  Soap,  the  Assay  and  Determination 
of  the  Value  of  Alkalies,  Fatty  Substances,  Soaps,  etc.  etc.  By* 
PROFESSOR  II.  DUSSAUCE.  With  an  Appendix,  containing  Ex 
tracts  from  the  Reports  of  the  International  Jury  on  Soaps,  as 
exhibited  in  the  Paris  Universal  Exposition,  1867,  numerous 
Tables,  etc.  etc.  Illustrated  by  engravings.  In  one  volume  Svo. 

of  over  800  pages .         .$1000 

•nUSSAUCE.— PRACTICAL  TREATISE  ON  THE  FABRICATION 
**.     OF  MATCHES,   GUN  COTTON,  AND  FULMINATING  POW 
DERS. 
By  Professor  H.  DUSSAUCE.     12mo.  .         .         .     $3  00 


D 


IIEXRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE.  71 

USSAUCE.— A  PRACTICAL  GUIDE  FOR  THE  PERFUMER : 
Being  a  New  Treatise  on  Perfumery  the  most  favorable  to  the 
Beauty  without  being  injurious  to  the  Health,  comprising  a 
Description  of  the  substances  used  in  Perfumery,  the  Form 
ulae  of  more  than  one  thousand  Preparations,  such  as  Cosme 
tics,  Perfumed  Oils,  Tooth  Powders,  Waters,  Extracts,  Tinc 
tures,  Infusions,  Vinaigres,  Essential  Oils,  Pastels,  Creams, 
Soaps,  and  many  new  Hygienic  Products  not  hitherto  described. 
Edited  from  Notes  and  Documents  of  Messrs.  Debay,  Lunel, 
etc.  With  additions  by  Professor  H.DUSSAUCE,  Chemist.  12mo. 

$3  00 

USSATJC3.— A  GENERAL  TREATISE  ON  THE  MANUFACTURE 
OF  VISE3AR,  THEORETICAL  AND  PRACTICAL. 
Comprising  the  various  methods,  by  the  slow  and  the  quick  pro 
cesses,  with  Alcohol,  Wine,  Grain,  Cider,  and  Molasses,  as  well 
as  the  Fabrication  of  Wood  Vinegar,  etc.  By  Prof.  II.  D  USSAUCE. 
I2tno.  $5  00 

A  COMPLETE  TREATISE  ON  THE  DISTILLATION 


**    AND  MANUFACTURE  OF  ALCOHOLIC  LIQUORS: 

From  the  French  of  M.  DUPLAIS.  Translated  and  Edited  by  M. 
MclvEXNiE,  M  D.  Illustrated  by  numerous  large  plates  and  wood 
engravings  of  the  best  apparatus  calculated  for 'producing  the 
finest  products.  In  one  vol.  royal  Svo.  £10  Oi) 

QS^"  This  is  a  treatise  of  the  highest  scientific  merit  and  of  the 
greatest  practical  value,  surpassing  in  these  respects,  as  well  as 
in  the  variety  of  its  contents,  any  similar  volume  in  the  English 
language. 

iE  GRAFF.— THE  GEOMETRICAL  STAIR-BUILDERS'  GUIDE  • 
Being  a  Plain  Practical  System  of  Hand-Railing,  embracing  all 
its  necessary  Details,  and  Geometrically  Illustrated  by  22  Steel 
Engravings  :  together  with  the  use  of  the  most  approved  princi 
ples  of  Practical  Geometry.  By  SIMON  DE  GRAFF,  Architect. 
4to $5  00 

YES  AtfD  COLOR-MAKER'S  COMPANION  : 
Containing  upwards  of  two  hundred  Receipts  for  making  Co 
lors,  on  the  most  approved  principles,  for  all  the  various  styles 
and  fabrics  now  in  existence  ;  with  the  Scouring  Process,  and 
plain  Directions  for  Preparing,  Washiug-off,  and  Finishing  tho 
Goods.  In  one  vol.  12mo §1  25 


D 


12  HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 


T7ASTON.—  A  PRACTICAL  TREATISE  ON  STREET  OR  HORSE- 
"P     POWER  RAILWAYS : 

Their  Location,  Construction,  and  Management ;  with  General 
,  Plans  and  Rules  for  their  Organization  and  Operation;  toge 
ther  with  Examinations  as  to  their  Comparative  Advantages 
over  the  Omnibus  System,  and  Inquiries  as  to  their  Value  for 
Investment;  including  Copies  of  Municipal  Ordinances  relat 
ing  thereto.  By  ALEXANDER  EASTON,  C.  E.  Illustrated  by  23 
plates,  8vo.,  cloth $2  00 

pORSYTH.— BOOK  OF  DESIGNS  FOR  HSAD-STONES,  MURAL, 
L      AND  OTHER  MONUMENTS  : 

Containing  78  Elaborate  and  Exquisite  Designs.     By   FORSYTE. 

4to.,  cloth $5  00 

*,£*  This  volume,  for  the  beauty  and  variety  of  its  designs,  has 
never  been  surpassed  by  any  publication  of  the  kind,  and  should 
be  in  the  hands  of  every  marble-worker  who  does  fine  monumental 
work. 

pAIRBAIRN.— THE  PRINCIPLES  OF  MECHANISM  AND  MA- 

r      CHINERY  OF  TRANSMISSION  : 

Comprising  the  Principles  of  Mechanism,  Wheels,  and  Pulleys, 
Strength  and  Proportions  of  Shafts,  Couplings  of  Shafts,  and 
Engaging  and  Disengaging  Gear.  By  WILLIAM  FAIRBAIRN, 
Esq.,  C.  E.,  LL.  D.,  F.  R.  S.,  F.  G.  S.,  Corresponding  Member 
of  the  National  Institute  of  France,  and  of  the  Royal  Academy 
of  Turin  ;  Chevalier  of  the  Legion  of  Honor,  etc.  etc.  Beau 
tifully  illustrated  by  over  150  wood-cuts.  In  one  volume  12mo. 

$2  50 

pAIRBAIRN.— PRIME-MOVERS  r 

Comprising  the  Accumulation  of  Water-power ;  the  Construc 
tion  of  Water-wheels  and  Turbines;  the  Properties  of  Steam; 
the  Varieties  of  Steam-engines  and  Boilers  and  Wind-mills. 
By  WILLIAM  FAIRBAIRN,  C.  E .,  LL.  D.,  F.  II.  S.,  F.  G.  S.  Au 
thor  of  "Principles  of  Mechanism  and  the  Machinery  of  Trans 
mission."  With  Numerous  Illustrations.  In  one  volume.  (In 
press.) 

niLBART.-A  PRACTICAL  TREATISE  ON  BANKING: 

By  JAMES  WILLIAM  GILBART.  To  which  is  added:  THE  NA 
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PESNER.— A  PRACTICAL  TREATISE  ON  COAL,  PETROLEUM, 
"    AND  OTHES  DISTILLED  OILS. 

By  ABRAHAM  GESSER,M.  D.,  F.  G.  S.  Second  edition,  revised 
and  enlarged.  By  GEORGE  WELTDEN  GESNEK,  Consulting 
Chemist  and  Engineer.  Illustrated.  Svo.  .  .  £3  50 


IIEXRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 


QOTRIC  ALBUM  FOR  CABINET  MAEZES  : 

Comprising  a  Collection  of  Designs  for  Gothic  Furniture.  Il 
lustrated  by  twenty-three  large  and  beautifully  engraved 
plates.  Oblong $3  00 

HE  A.NT.— BEET-ROOT    SUGAR    AND  CULTIVATION  OF  THE 
U    BEET: 

By  E.  B.  GRANT.     12mo $1  25 

rpEGORY.-MATHEMATICS  FOR  PRACTICAL  MEN  : 

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and  Civil  Engineers.  By  OLINTHTJS  GREGORY.  Svo.,  plates, 
cloth §3  00 

Q-RIS WOLD. —RAILROAD  ENGINEER'S  POCKET  COMPANION. 
Comprising  Rules  for  Calculating  Deflection  Distances  and 
Angles,  Tangential  Distances  and  Angles,  and  all  Necessary 
Tables  for  Engineers;  also  the  art  of  Levelling  f  om  Prelimi 
nary  Survey  to  the  Construction  of  Railroads,  intended  Ex 
pressly  for  the  Young  Engineer,  together  with  Numerous  Valu 
able  Rules  and  Examples.  By  W.  GRISWOLD.  12mo.,  tucks. 

$1  75 

QJJETTIER.— METALLIC  ALLOYS  : 

Being  a  Practical  Guide  to  their  Chemical  and  Physical  Pro 
perties,  their  Preparation,  Composition,  and  Uses.  Translate'] 
from  the  French  of  A.  GUETTIER,  Engineer  and  Director  of 
Founderies,  author  of  "  La  Fouderie  en  France,"  etc.  etc.  By 
A.  A.  FESQUET,  Chemist  and  Engineer.  In  one  volume,  12mo. 

$300 


H 


H 


ATS  AND  FELTING : 

A  Practical  Treatise  on  their  Manufacture.  By  a  Practical 
Hatter.  Illustrated  by  Drawings  of  Machinery,  &c  ,  8vo. 

AY.— THE  INTERIOR  DECORATOR  : 

The  Laws  of  Harmonious  Coloring  adapted  to  Interior  Decora 
tions:  with  a  Practical  Treatise  on  House-Painting.  By  D. 
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gram  of  the  Primary,  Secondary,  and  Tertiary  Colors.  12mo. 

S2  25 

FGHES.— AMERICAN    MILLER    AND    MILLWRIGHT'S    AS- 
SISTANT : 

By  VYTM.  CARTER  HUGHES.  A  new  edition.  In  one  volume, 
12mo ,  Si  50 


14  HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 

JTUNT— THE  PRACTICE  OF  PHOTOGRAPHY. 

By  ROBERT  HUNT,  Vice- President  of  the  Photographic  Society, 
London.    With  numerous  illustrations.    12mo.,  cloth  .  75 


TjTTTRST.— A  HAND-BOOK  FOR  ARCHITECTURAL  SURVEYORS  : 

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of  Weights,  of  the  materials  used  in  Building,  Memoranda 
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Builders'  Measurement,  Contracts  of  Labor,  Valuation  of  Pro 
perty,  Summary  of  the  Practice  in  Dilapidation,  etc.  etc.  By 
J.  F.  HURST,  C.  E.  2d  edition,  pocket-book  form,  full  bound 

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TERVIS.— RAILWAY  PROPERTY: 

A  Treatise  on  the  Construction  and  Management  of  Railways ; 
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holders  of  this  class  of  property ;  as  well  as  Railway  Mana 
gers,  Officers,  and  Agents.  By  JOHN  B.  JERVIS,  late  Chief 
Engineer  of  the  Hudson  River  Railroad,  Croton  Aqueduct,.  £c. 
One  vol.  12mo.,  cloth  ....  .  .  $2  00 


JOHNSON.— A  REPORT  TO  THE  NAVY  DEPARTMENT  OF  THE 

"      UNITED  STATES  ON  AMERICAN  COALS : 

Applicable  to  Steam  Navigation  and  to  other  purposes.  By 
WALTER  R.  JOHNSON.  With  numerous  illustrations.  GOT  pp. 
8vo.,  .'  .  ...  $10  00 


JOHNSTON.— INSTRUCTIONS  FOR  THE  ANALYSIS  OF  SOILS, 
U      LIMESTONES,  AND  MANURES- 

By  J.  W.  F.  JOHNSTON.     12mo.          •        .        .        .          35 


A  HAND-BOOK  OF  PRACTICAL  GAUGING, 

For  the  Use  of  Beginners,  to  which  is  added  a  Chapter  on  Dis 
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HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE.  15 

KENTISH.— A  TKEATISE  ON  A  BOX  OF  INSTRUMENTS, 

And  the  Slide  Rule ;  with  the  Theory  of  Trigonometry  and  Lo 
garithms,  including  Practical  Geometry,  Surveying,  Measur 
ing  of  Timber,  Cask  and  Malt  Gauging,  Heights,  and  Distances. 
By  THOMAS  KENTISH.  In  one  volume.  12mo.  .  .  $1  25 


T7°OBELL.— ERNL— MINERALOGY  SIMPLIFIED : 

A  short  method  of  Determining  and  Classifying  Minerals,  by 
means  of  simple  Chemical  Experiments  in  the  Wet  Way. 
Translated  from  the  last  German  Edition  of  F.  VON  KOBELL, 
•with  an  Introduction  to  Blowpipe  Analysis  and  other  addi 
tions.  By  HENRI  ERXI,  M.  D.,  Chief  Chemist,  Department  of 
Agriculture,  author  of  "Coal  Oil  and  Petroleum."  In  one 
volume.  12rno.  .  .  .  .  $2  50 


TANDRIN.— A  TREATISE  ON  STEEL : 

Comprising  its  Theory,  Metallurgy,  Properties,  Practical  Work 
ing,  and  Use.  By  M.  H.  C.  LANDRIN,  Jr.,  Civil  Engineer. 
Translated  from  the  French,  with  Notes,  by  A.  A.  FESQUET, 
Chemist  and  Engineer.  With  an  Appendix  on  the  Bessemer 
and  the  Martin  Processes  for  Manufacturing  Steel,  from  the 
Report  of  ABRAM  S.  HEWITT,  United  States  Commissioner  to 
the  Universal  Exposition,  Paris,  1867.  12mo.  .  .  $3  00 


TARKIN.— THE  PRACTICAL  BRASS  AND  IRON  FOUNDER'S 
**    GUIDE. 

A  Concise  Treatise  on  Brass  Founding,  Moulding,  the  Metals 
and  their  Alloys,  etc.;  to  which  are  added  Recent  Improve 
ments  in  the  Manufacture  of  Iron,  Steel  by  the  Bessemer  Pro 
cess,  etc.  etc.  By  JAMES  LARKIN,  late  Conductor  of  the  Brass 
Foundry  Department  in  Reany,  Neafie  &  Co.'s  Penn  Works, 
Philadelphia.  Fifth  edition,  revised,  with  extensive  Addi 
tions.  In  one  volume.  12mo $2  25 


Ifc  HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 

__ „ __ _ ....-...••  •..  ..•.^.^ 

T  EAVITT.— FACTS  ABOUT  PEAT  AS  AN  ARTICLE  OF  FUEL : 

"With  Remarks  upon  its  Origin  and  Composition,  the  Localities 
in  which  it  is  found,  the  Methods  of  Preparation  and  Manu 
facture,  and  the  various  Uses  to  which  it  is  applicable ;  toge 
ther  with  many  other  matters  of  Practical  and  Scientific  Inte 
rest.  To  which  is  added  a  chapter  on  the  Utilization  of  Coal 
Dust  with  Peat  for  the  Production  of  an  Excellent  Fuel  at 
Moderate  Cost,  especially  adapted  for  Steam  Service.  By  H. 
T.  LEAVITT.  Third  edition.  I2mo.  .  .  .  $1  75 

TEROUX  —  A    PRACTICAL    TREATISE    ON    THE    MANUFAC- 

^     TURE  OF  WORSTEDS  AND  CARDED  YARNS: 

Translated  from  tho  French  of  CHARLES  LEROUX,  Mechanical 
Engineer,  and  Superintendent  of  a  Spinning  Mill.  By  Dr  II. 
PAINE,  and  A.  A.  FESQUET.  Illustrated  by  12  ta-rge  plates ,  In 
one  volume  8vo.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  $5  00 

TESLIE  (MISS).— COMPLETE  COOKERY: 

Directions  for  Cookery  in  its  Various  Branches.  By  Miss 
LESLIE.  60th  edition.  Thoroughly  revised,  with  the  addi 
tion  of  New  Receipts.  In  1  vol.  12mo.,  cloth  .  .  $1  50 

TESLIE  (MISS).  LADIES'  HOUSE  BOOK: 

a  Manual  of  Domestic  Economy.  20th  revised  edition.  12mo., 
cloth '  .  .  $1  25 

TESLIE    (MISS).— TWO    HUNDRED    RECEIPTS    IN    FRENCH 
•^     COOKERY. 

12mo .         .         .  50 

TIEBER.— ASSAYER'S  GUIDE  i 

Or,  Practical  Directions  to  Assayers,  Miners,  and  Smelters,  for 
the  Tests  and  Assays,  by  Heat  and  by  Wet  Processes,  for  the 
Ores  of  all  the  principal  Metals,  of  Gold  and  Silver  Coins  and 
Alloys,  and  of  Coal,  etc.  By  OSCAR  M.  LIBBER.  12mo.,  cloth 

$1  25 

T  OVE.— THE  ART  OF  DYEING,  CLEANING,  SCOURING,  AND 

*-*     FINISHING: 

On  the  most  approved  English  and  French  methods;  being 
Practical  Instructions  in  Dyeing  Silks,  Woollens,  and  Cottons, 
Feathers,  Chips,  Straw,  etc.;  Scouring  and  Cleaning  Bed  and 
Window  Curtains,  Carpets,  Rugs,  etc.;  French  and  English 
Cleaning,  etc.  By  THOMAS  LOVE.  Second  American  Edition,  to 
which  are  added  General  Instructions  for  the  Use  of  Aniline 
Colors,  8vo.  .  .  5  00 


HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE.  17 

TWTAIN  AND  BROWN.— QUESTIONS  ON  SUBJECTS  CONNECTED 
WITH  THE  MARINE  STEAM-ENGINE : 

And  Examination  Papers  ;  with  Hints  for  their  Solution.  By 
THOMAS  J.  MAI.V,  Professor  of  Mathematics,  Royal  Naval  College, 
and  THOMAS  BROWN,  Chief  Engineer,  R.  N.  12mo.,  cloth  $1  50 

J^AIN  AND  BROWN.— THE  INDICATOR  AND  DYNAMOMETEI  : 
With  their  Practical  Applications  to  the  Steam-Engine.  By 
THOMAS  J.  MAIN*,  M.  A.  F.  R.,  Ass't  Prof.  Royal  Naval  College, 
Portsmouth,  and  THOMAS  BROWN,  Assoc.  Inst.  C.  E.,  Chief  En 
gineer,  R.  N.,  attached  to  the  R.  N.  College.  Illustrated.  From 
the  Fourth  London  Edition.  8vo.  .-  ,  .  $1  50 

TWTAIN  AND  BROWN  —THE  MARINE  STEAM-ENGINE. 

By  THOMAS  J.  MAIN,  F.  R.  Ass't  S.  Mathematical  Professor  at 
Royal  Naval  College,  and  THOMAS  BROWN,  Assoc.  Inst.  C.  E. 
Chief  Engineer,  R.  N.  Attached  to  the  Royal  Naval  College. 
Authors  of  "Questions  Connected  with  the  Marine  Steam-En 
gine,"  and  the  '•'  Indicator  and  Dynamometer."  With  numerous 
Illustrations.  In  one  volume  8vo.  .  .  .  •  .  .  $5  00 

TUT ARTIN.— SCREW-CUTTING  TABLES,  FOR  THE  USE  OF  ME- 
1Y±  CHANICAL  ENGINEERS : 

Showing  the  Proper  Arrangement  of  Wheels  for  Cutting  the 
Threads  of  Screws  of  any  required  Pitch ;  with  a  Table  for 
Making  the  Universal  Gas-Pipe  Thread  and  Taps.  By  W.  A. 

MARTIN,  Engineer.     8vo 50 

TWTILES— A  PLAIN  TREATISE  ON  HORSE-SHOEING. 

With  Illustrations.  By  WILLIAM  MILES,  author  of  "  The  Horse's 
Foot" 

TyrOLES WORTH.— POCKET-BOOK  OF  USEFUL  FORMULAE  AND 
1  MEMORANDA  FOR  CIVIL  AND  MECHANICAL  EN3INEERS. 
By  GUILFORD  L.  MOLESWORTH,  Member  of  the  Institution  of 
Civil  Engineers,  Chief  Resident  Engineer  of  the  Ceylon  Railway. 
Second  American  from  the  Tenth  London  Edition.  In  one 
volume,  full  bound  in  pocket-book  form  .....  $2  00 

jy^OORE.— THE  INVENTOR'S  GUIDE : 

Patent  Office  and  Patent  Laws  :  or,  a  Guide  to  Inventors,  and  a 
Book  of  Reference  for  Judges,  Lawyers,  Magistrates,  and  others. 
By  J  G.MOORE.  12mo.,  cloth  .  .  .  .  $1  25 

RAPIER.—  A  MANUAL  OF  ELECTRO-METALLURGY: 

Including  the  Application  of  the  Art  to  Manufacturing  Processes. 
By  JAMES  NAPIE*R.  Fourth  American,  from  the  Fourth  London 
edition,  revised  and  enlarged.  Illustrated  by  engravings.  In 
one  volume,  8vo.  .  .'  .  .  ."  ...  $2  00 


18  HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 


.— A  SYSTEM  OF  CHEMISTRY  APPLIED  TO  DYEING: 
•^  Bv  JAMES  NAPIER,  F.  C.  S.  A  New  and  Thoroughly  Revised 
Edition,  completely  brought  up  to  the  present  state  of  the 
Science,  including  the  Chemistry  of  Coal  Tar  Colors.  By  A.  A. 
FESQUET, 'Chemist  and  Engineer.  With  an  Appendix  on  Dyeing 
and  Calico  Printing,  as  shown  at  the  Paris  Universal  Exposition 
of  1867,  from  the  Reports  of  the  International  Jury,  etc.  Illus 
trated.  In  one  volume  8vo.,  400  pages  .  .  '  .  .  $5  00 

•VTEWBERY.—  GLEANINGS    FROM    ORNAMENTAL    ART    OF 
1N    EVERY  STYLE; 

Drawn  from  Examples  in  the  British,  South  Kensington,  Indian, 
Crystal  Palace,  and  other  Museums,  the  Exhibitions  of  1851  and 
1862,  and  the  best  English  and  Foreign  works.  In  a  series  of  one 
hundred  exquisitely  drawn  Plntes,  containing  many  hundred  ex 
amples.  By  ROBERT  NEWBERY.  4to $15  00 

JJICHOLSON.— A  MANUAL  OF  THE  ART  OF  BOOK-BINDING: 
Containing  full  instructions  in  the  different  Branches  of  Forward 
ing,  Gilding,  and  Finishing.  Also,  the  Art  of  Marbling  Book- 
edges  and  Paper.  By  JAMES  B.  NICHOLSON.  Illustrated.  12mo. 
cloth  .  .  .  .  ....  .  .  $2  25 

•VTORRIS.— A  HAND-BOOK  FOR  LOCOMOTIVE  ENGINEERS  AND 

^    MACHINISTS: 

Comprising  the  Proportions  and  Calculations  for  Constructing 
Locomotives ;  Manner  of  Setting  Valves ;  Tables  of  Squares, 
Cubes,  Areas,  etc.  etc.  By  SEPTIMUS  NORRIS,  Civil  and  Me 
chanical  Engineer.  New  edition.  Illustrated,  12mo.,  cloth 

$2  00 

fTYSTROM.  —  ON    TECHNOLOGICAL    EDUCATION    AND   THE 
1N    CONSTRUCTION  OF  SHIPS  AND  SCREW  PROPELLERS : 

For  Naval  and  Marine  Engineers.  By  JOHN  W.  NYSTROM,  late 
Acting  Chief  Engineer  U.  S.  N.  Second  edition,  revised  with 
additional  matter.  Illustrated  by  seven  engravings.  12mo. 

$2  50 

NEILL.— A  DICTIONARY  OF  DYEING  AND  CALICO  PRINT 
ING: 

Containing  a  brief  account  of  all  the  Substances  and  Processes  in 
use  in  the  Art  of  Dyeing  and  Printing  Textile  Fabrics  :  with  Prac 
tical  Receipts  and  Scientific  Information.  By  CHARLES  O'NEILL, 
Analytical  Chemist;  Fellow  of  the  Chemical  Society  of  London; 
Member  of  the  Literary  and  Philosophical  Society  of  Manchester  ; 
Author  of  "  Chemistry  of  Calico  Printing  and  Dyeing."  To  which 
is  added  An  Essay  on  Coal  Tar  Colors  and  their  Application  to 


0 


HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE.  19 

Dyeing  and  Calico  Printing.  By  A.  A.  FESQUET,  Chemist  and 
Engineer.  With  an  Appendix  on  Dyeing  and  Calico  Printing,  as 
shown  at  the  Exposition  of  1867,  from  the  Reports  of  the  Interna. 
tional  Jury,  etc.  In  one  volume  8vo.,  491  pages  .  .  $6  00 

QSBORN.— THE  METALLURGY  OF  IRON  AND  STEEL : 

Theoretical  and  Practical :  In  all  its  Branches  ;  With  Special  Re 
ference  to  American  Materials  and  Processes.  By  II.  S.  OSBORN, 
LL.  D.,  Professor  of  Mining  and  Metallurgy  in  Lafayette  College, 
Easton,  Pa.  Illustrated  by  230  Engravings  on  Wood,  and  6 
Folding  Plates.  8vo.,  972  pages $10  00 

QSBORN.— AMERICAN  MINES  AND  MINING  : 

^     Theoretically  and  Practically  Considered.     By  Prof.   II.   S.    Os- 
BORN,  Illustrated  by  numerous  engravings.  Svo.    (In  preparation.} 

pAINTER,  GILDER,  AND  VARNISHER'S  COMPANION : 

Containing  Rules  and  Regulations  in  everything  relating  to  the 
Arts  of  Painting,  Gilding,  Varnishing,  and  Glass  Staining,  with 
numerous  useful  and  valuable  Receipts;  Tests  for  the  Detection 
of  Adulterations  in  Oils  and  Colors,  and  a  statement  of  the  Dis 
eases  and  Accidents  to  which  Painters,  Gilders,  and  Varnishers 
are  particularly  liable,  with  the  simplest  methods  of  Prevention 
and  Ptemedy.  With  Directions  for  Graining,  Marbling,  Sign  Writ 
ing,  and  Gilding  on  Glass.  To  which  are  added  COMPLETE  INSTRUC 
TIONS  FOR  COACH  PAINTING  AND  VARNISHING.  12mo.,  cloth,  $1  50 

pALLETT.— THE    MILLER'S,    MILLWRIGHT'S,    AND    ENGI- 

1     NEER'S  GUIDE. 

By  HENRY  PALLETT.     Illustrated.     In  one  vol.  12mo.      .     $3  00 

pERKINS.— GAS  AND  VENTILATION. 

Practical  Treatise  on  Gas  and  Ventilation.  With  Special  Relation 
to  Illuminating,  Heating,  and  Cooking  by  Gas.  Including  Scien 
tific  Helps  to  Engineer-students  and  others.  With  illustrated 
Diagrams.  By  E.  E.  PERKINS.  12mo.,  cloth  .  .  .  $1  25 

pERKINS  AND  STOWE.— A  NEW  GUIDE  TO  THE  SHEET-IRON 
AND  BOILER  PLATE  ROLLER: 

Containing  a  Series  of  Tables  showing  the  Weight  of  Slabs  and 
Piles  to  Produce  Boiler  Plates,  and  of  the  Weight  of  Piles  and  the 
Sizes  of  Bars  to  Produce  Sheet-iron ;  the  Thickness  of  the  Bar 
Gauge  in  Decimals ;  the  Weight  per  foot,  and  the  Thickness  on 
the  Bar  or  Wire  Gauge  of  the  fractional  parts  of  an  inch ;  the 
Weight  per  sheet,  and  the  Thickness  on  the  Wire  Gauge  of  Sheet- 
iron  of  various  dimensions 'to  weigh  112  Ibs.  per  bundle  ;  and  the 
conversion  of  Short  Weight  into  Long  Weight,  and  Long  Weight 
into  Short.  Estimated  and  collected"  by  G.  H.  PERKINS  and  J.  G- 
STOWE  $2  50 


20  HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 

pHILLIPS  AND  DAELINGTON.—  EECOEBS  OF  MINING  AND 

*     METALLUEGY : 

Or,  Facts  and  Memoranda  for  the  use  of  the  Mine  Agent  and 
Smelter.  By  J.  ARTHUR  PHILLIPS,  Mining  Engineer,  Graduate  of 
the  Imperial  School  of  Mines,  France,  etc.,  and  JOHN  DARLINGTON. 
Illustrated  by  numerous  engravings.  In  one  vol.  12mo.  .  $2  00 

pEADAL,    MALEPEYEE,     AND    DUSSAUCE.  —  A    COMPLETE 

•*•     TEEATISE  ON  PEEFUMEEY: 

Containing  notices  of  the  Raw  Material  used  in  the  Ait,  and  the 
Best  Formulas.  According  to  the  most  approved  Methods  followed 
in  France,  England,  and  the  United  States.  By  M.  P.  PRADAL, 
Perfumer-Chemist,  and  M.  F.  MALEPEYRE.  Translated  from  the 
French,  with  extensive  additions,  by  Prof.  H.  DUSSAUCE.  Svo.  $10 

pEOTEAUX.— PEACTICAL   GUIDE  FOE  THE  MANUFACTUEE 
L     OF  PAPEE  AND  BOAEDS. 

By  A.  PROTEAUX,  Civil  Engineer,  and  Graduate  of  the  School  of 
Arts  and  Manufactures,  Director  of  Thiers's  Paper  Mill,  'Pny-de- 
Dome.  With  additions,  by  L.  S.  LE  NORMAND.  Translated  from 
the  French,  with  Notes,  by  HORATIO  PAINE,  A.  B.,  M.  D.  To 
which  is  added  a  Chapter  on  the  Manufacture  of  Paper  from  Wood 
in  the  United  States,  by  HENRY  T.  BROWN,  of  the  "American 
Artisan."  Illustrated  by  six  plates,  containing  Drawings  of  Raw 
Materials,  Machinery,  Plans  of  Paper-Mills,  etc.  etc.  Svo.  $5  00 

"DEGNAULT.— ELEMENTS  OF  CHEMISTEY. 

By  M.  V.  REGNAULF.  Translated  from  the  French  by  T.  FOR 
REST  BENTON,  M.  Ik,  and  edited,  with  notes,  by  JAMES  C.  BOOTH, 
Melter  and  Refiner  U.  S.  Mint,  and  WM.  L.  FABER,  Metallurgist 
and  Mining  Engineer.  Illustrated  by  nearly  700  wood  engravings. 
Comprising  nearly  1500  pages.  In  two  vols.  8vo.,  cloth  $10  00 

•pEID.— A  PEACTICAL  TEEATISE  ON  THE  MANUFACITJEE  OF 

11    POETLAND  CEMENT: 

By  HENRY  REID,  C.  E.  To  which  is  added  a  Translation  of  M. 
A.  Lipowitz's  Work,  describing  anew  method  adopted  in  Germany 
of  Manufacturing  that  Cement.  By  W.  F.  REID.  Illustrated  by 
plates  and  wood  engravings.  Svo.  .  .  .  .  •  .  $7  00 

TjIFFAULT,    VEEGNAUD,    AND    TOUSSAINT.— A   PEACTICAL 

11    TEEATISE    ON   THE    MANUFACTUEE    OF    COLOES    FOE 
PAINTING : 

Containing  the  best  Formulae  and  the  Processes  the  Newest  and 
in  most  General  Use.  By  MM.  RIFFAULT,  YERGNAUD,  and  TOUS 
SAINT.  Revised  and  Edited  by  M.  F.  MALEPEYRE  and  Dr.  EMIT, 
WINCKLER.  Illustrated  by  Engravings.  In  one  vol.  Svo.  {/;* 


HENRY  CAREY  BATRD'S  CATALOGUE.  21 


tJIFFAULI,    VERGNAUD,    AND    TOUSSAINT.— A    PRACTICAL 
TREATISE  ON  THE  MANUFACTURE  OF  VARNISHES: 
By  MM.   RIFFAULT,  VERGNAUD,  and   TOUSSAIXT.     Revised  and 
Edited  by  M.  F.  MALEPEYRE  and  Dr.  EMIL  WINCKLER.     Illus 
trated.     In  one  vol.  8vo.      (In preparation.') 

OHUNK.— A  PRACTICAL  TREATISE    ON   RAILWAY   CURVES 
10    AND  LOCATION,  FOR  YOUNG  ENGINEERS. 

By  WM.  F.  SHUXK,  Civil  Engineer.     12mo.,  tucks    .         .     $2  00 

OMEATON.— BUILDER'S  POCKET  COMPANION: 

Containing  the  Elements  of  Building,  Surveying,  and  Architec 
ture  ;  -with  Practical  Rules  and  Instructions  connected  with  the  sub 
ject.  By  A.  C.  SMEATON,  Civil  Engineer,  etc.  In  one  volume, 
12mo.  .  . .  .  $1  50 

gMITH.— THE  DYER'S  INSTRUCTOR: 

Comprising  Practical  Instructions  in  the  Art  of  Dyeing  Silk,  Cot 
ton,  Wool,  and  Worsted,  and  Woollen  Goods  :  containing  nearly 
800  Receipts.  To  which  is  added  a  Treatise  on  tha  Art  of  Pad 
ding ;  and  the  Printing  of  Silk  Warps,  Skeins,  and  Handkerchiefs, 
and  the  various  Mordants  and  Colors  for  the  different  styles  of 
such  work.  By  DAVID  SMITH,  Pattern  Dyer,  12mo.,  cloth 

$3  00 
gMITH.— THE  PRACTICAL  DYER'S  GUIDE: 

Comprising  Practical  Instructions  in  the  Dyeing  of  Shot  Cobourgs, 
Silk  Striped  Orleans,  Colored  Orleans  from  Black  Warps,  ditto 
from  White  Warps,  Colored  Cobourgs  from  White  Warps,  Merinos, 
Yarns,  Woollen  Cloths,  etc.  Containing  nearly  300  Receipts,  to 
most  of  which  a  Dyed  Pattern  is  annexed.  Also,  a  Treatise  on 
the  Art  of  Padding.  By  DAVID  SMITH.  In  one  vol.  8vo.  $25  00 

OHAW.— CIVIL  ARCHITECTURE: 

Being  a  Complete  Theoretical  and  Practical  System  of  Building, 
containing  the  Fundamental  Principles  of  the  Art.  By  EDWARD 
SHAW,  Architect.  To  which  is  added  a  Treatise  on  Gothic  Archi 
tecture,  <te.  By  THOMAS  W.  SILLOWAY  and  GEORGE  M.  HARD 
ING  ,  Architects.  The  whole  illustrated  by  102  quarto  plates  finely 
engraved  on  copper.  Eleventh  Edition.  4to.  Cloth.  $1000 

OLOAN.— AMERICAN  HOUSES : 

A  variety  of  Original  Designs  for  Rural  Buildings.  Illustrated  by 
25  colored  Engravings,  with  Descriptive  References.  By  SAMUEL 
SLOAX,  Architect,  authorof  the  "  Model  Architect,"  etc.  etc.  Svo. 

$2  50 

qCHINZ.— RESEARCHES   ON  THE   ACTION   OF   THE   BLAST. 
0    FURNACE. 

By  CSAS.  SCHINZ,     Seven  plates.     12mo.          .        .         .     $4  25 


22  HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 


gMITH.— PARKS  AND  PLEASURE  GROUNDS : 

Or,  Practical  Notes  on  Country  Residences,  Villas,  Public  Parks, 
and  Gardens.  By  CHARLES  H.  J.  SMITH,  Landscape  Gardener 
and  Garden  Architect,  etc.  etc.  12mo $2  25 

HTOKES.— CABINET-MAKER'S  AND  UPHOLSTERER'S  COMPA- 
°    NION: 

Comprising  the  Rudiments  and  Principles  of  Cabinet-making  and 
Upholstery,  with  Familiar  Instructions,  Illustrated  by  Examples 
for  attaining  a  Proficiency  in  the  Art  of  Drawing,  as  applicable 
to  Cabinet-work  ;  The  Processes  of  Veneering,  Inlaying,  and 
Buhl- work  ;  the  Art  of  Dyeing  and  Staining  Wood,  Bone,  Tortoise 
Shell,  etc.  Directions  for  Lackering,  Japanning,  and  Varnishing; 
to  make  French  Polish  ;  to  prepare  the  Best  Glues,  Cements,  and 
Compositions,  and  a  number  of  Receipts,  particularly  for  workmen 
generally.  By  J.  STOKES.  In  one  vol.  12mo.  With  illustrations 

$1  25 
STRENGTH  AND  OTHER  PROPERTIES  OF  METALS. 

Reports  of  Experiments  on  the  Strength  and  other  Properties  of 
Metals  for  Cannon.  With  a  Description  of  the  Machines  for  Test 
ing  Metals,  and  of  the  Classification  of  Cannon  in  service.  By 
Officers  of  the  Ordnance  Department  U.'S.  Army.  By  authority 
of  the  Secretary  of  War.  Illustrated  by  25  large  steel  plates.  In 
1  vol.  quarto  ........  .  $10  00 

OULLIVAN.— PROTECTION  TO  NATIVE  INDUSTRY. 

^    By  Sir  EDWARD  SULLIVAN,  Baronet.    (1870.)     8vo.         .     $150 

rpABLES  SHOWING  THE  WEIGHT  OF  ROUND,  SQUARE,  AND 
1     FLAT  BAR  IRON,  STEEL,  ETC. 

By  Measurement.     Cloth  ......  63 

mAYLOR.— STATISTICS  OF  COAL: 

"*"  Including  Mineral  Bituminous  Substances  employed  in  Arts  and 
Manufactures  ;  with  their  Geographical,  Geological,  and  Commer 
cial  Distribution  and  amount  of  Production  and  Consumption  on 
the  American  Continent.  With  Incidental  Statistics  of  the  Iron 
Manufacture.  By  R.  C.  TAYLOR.  Second  edition,  revised  by  S. 
S.  HALDEMAN.  Illustrated  by  five  Maps  and  many  wood  engrav 
ings.  Svo.,  cloth  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  $6  00 

T»EMPLETON.— THE    PRACTICAL   EXAMINATOR    ON    STEAM 

1     AND  THE  STEAM-ENGINE  : 

With  Instructive  References  relative  thereto,  for  the  Use  of  Engi 
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HENRY  CAREY  BAIRD'S  CATALOGUE.  23 

rpHOMAS.-THE  MODERN  PRACTICE  OF  PHOTOGRAPHY. 

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24  HENRY  CAREY  EAIRD'S  CATALOGUE. 


•rerATsoN.—  THE  MODERN  PRACTICE  OF  AMERICAN  MA- 

VV   CHINISTS  AND  ENGINEERS  : 

Including  the  Construction,  Application,  and  Use  of  Drills,  Lathe 
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TTTTORSSAM.—  ON  MECHANICAL  SAWS: 

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WOHLER.—  A  HAND-BOOK  OF  MINERAL  ANALYSIS. 

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